Basrayatha: The Story of a City

by Muhammad Khudayyir, William Maynard Hutchins (Translator)

Basrayatha is a literary tribute by author Muhammad Khudayyir to the city of his birth, Basra, on the Shatt al-Arab waterway in southern Iraq.

Just as a city’s inhabitants differ from outsiders through their knowledge of its streets and stories, so Khudayyir distinguishes between the real city of Basra and the imagined city he created through stories, experiences, and folklore. By turns a memoir, a travelog, a love letter, and a meditation, Basrayatha summons up a city long gone, yet which lives on in the memories and imaginations of its people. In the tradition of Calvino and Borges, Khudayyir’s mesmerizing work itself illuminates and enriches the story of this magnificent city.

Genres: Middle East

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 2008

Reviews

[Becky Skillin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in stream of consciousness, it is a series of thoughts on how people and the desert interact around the area of Basrah, Iraq.

Since it was originally written in 1997, it’s a love letter as well as a lament of lost civilization. Saddam Hussain was in power at the time, so there was no mention of recent events, just lost waterways and cultures that were drained in the South.

I found it difficult to follow, but the series of short sections were helpful to group the ideas together somewhat.

[Floyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the greatest book ever written. The story of everything ….

[Jayme(theghostreader) · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is so dry, it reads like toast. It was required to read for my bookclub and I started reading it but ended up skimming through it. I think they could have written the book in a more interesting form and made it more like a story and not like a tour guide.

[Bill Littell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a real struggle to get through. Maybe if I would have gone in regarding it as a long piece of poetry, I would have had a better time. This is not a book I would ever recommend to students.

[Max · Rating 2 out of 5]

On a sentence level it was beautiful but on a paragraph level it was a slog and on a chapter level it was completely opaque.