Out of Mesopotamia

by Salar Abdoh

Informed by firsthand experience on the battlefronts of Iraq and Syria, Abdoh captures the horror, confusion, and absurdity of combat from a seldom-glimpsed perspective that expands our understanding of the war novel.

Saleh, the narrator of Out of Mesopotamia, is a middle-aged Iranian journalist who moonlights as a writer for one of Iran’s most popular TV shows but cannot keep himself away from the front lines in neighboring Iraq and Syria. There, the fight against the Islamic State is a proxy war, an existential battle, a declaration of faith, and, for some, a passing weekend affair.

After weeks spent dodging RPGs, witnessing acts of savagery and stupidity, Saleh returns to civilian life in Tehran but finds it to be an unbearably dislocating experience. Pursued by his official handler from state security, opportunistic colleagues, and the woman who broke his heart, Saleh has reason to again flee from everyday life. Surrounded by men whose willingness to achieve martyrdom both fascinates and appalls him, Saleh struggles to make sense of himself and the turmoil in his midst.

An unprecedented glimpse into “endless war” from a Middle Eastern perspective, Out of Mesopotamia follows in the tradition of the Western canon of martial writers--from Hemingway and Orwell to Tim O’Brien and Philip Caputo--but then subverts and expands upon the genre before completely blowing it apart. Drawing from his firsthand experience of being embedded with Shia militias on the ground in Iraq and Syria, Abdoh gives agency to the voiceless while offering a meditation on war that is moving, humane, darkly funny, and resonantly true.

Genres: Fiction, War, Iran, Historical Fiction, Middle East, Literary Fiction, Asia

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2020

About the author

Salar Abdoh is an author and writer. His latest novel is A Nearby Country Called Love (Viking Penguin, 2023). His book, Out of Mesopotamia (Akashic, 2020), has been hailed as “One of a handful of great modern war novels,” and was a NYTimes Editors’ Choice, and also selected as a Best Book of the year across several platforms, including Publishers Weekly. He is also the author of Tehran At Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir.

Mostly dividing his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran, Abdoh regularly publishes personal essays and short stories, plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world.

A professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, he conducts workshops in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergraduate creative writing.

Reviews

[Leila Soltani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have some mixed feelings about this book.

As a general reader I liked the overall picture the story describes. The feelings are written so vividly and you enjoy following the characters.
Although as an Iranian I got confused. I could not imagine Saleh as a journalist and art critic in today Iran with connections as described. being so free spirit and still can go to Iraq for war and be that close to his interrogator.
The characters of Atieh and Miss Homa were also hard to put in the setting.
I generally enjoyed reading the story but it was hard for me to imagine those people in Iran. They seemed far from the general culture in Iran's government (not from the people)

It was hard for me to put modern cultured people in Iraq and Syria war scenes, but I can imagine if you are not Iranian and/or not having any up to date cultural data, you'd enjoy the story.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

10/10 for creativity and for being unique and different and thought-provoking...

I came to this by an indirect route, but I'm glad it came to my attention, and my guess is that, next, I'll try Abdoh's most recent book or one of earlier his Noir offerings.

This wasn't a particularly easy or pleasant read, and I concede that my (not just Western, but ... fill in the blanks) perspective ill prepared me for the characters or the narrative, ... and that's OK.

Given how much I've read about (and how many people I know who served in or covered) the various military actions in the region, I wasn't sure what to expect ... so, to the extent that the book felt chaotic and confusing and disorienting ... well that all seemed to make sense.

It's a well crafted piece of literature offering a perspective from a (massive and diverse) population that far too often is simply dismissed as "other."

Shelving conventions: this isn't military history or military historical fiction or ... frankly ... much of anything military in the common use of the word, but I feel like I've placed in on the correct shelf, alongside everything from Redeployment and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Thank You for Your Service and The Good Soldiers or War Dogs to, I dunno, Sunrise Over Fallujah or even Battle Born: Lapis Lazuli or The White Donkey: Terminal Lance.

[Sarah-Hope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm torn about when/how to write this review. On the one hand, I have so little contextual knowledge in which to place my reading of Out of Mesopotamia that anything I write will represent only an incomplete understanding of the title. On the other hand, the longer I wait, the less I'll remember about the title (yep, I'm getting to that point where short-term memory ain't what it used to be), which will make my review incomplete in a different sense.

I chose to read this title based on my respect for one of Abdoh's earlier novels: Tehran at Twilight. Like Out of Mesopotamia, Tehran at Twilight was a stretch title for me: a book for which I clearly wasn't the primary audience and yet I felt as if I were exactly the sort of person who needed to read it because its world was so unfamiliar to me.

Out of Mesopotamia is written in the voice of an Irani reporter who is pulled in multiple directions, leaving him without a sense of any space in which he genuinely belongs. He's a committed Muslim, yet his daily practice of the faith is haphazard. He believes that the conflicts Iran is engaging in against Iraq and Syria are holy wars. He admires the war's martyrs while he's unable to make the choice of being one himself. The woman who is his closest friend is marrying a man he works for, but for whom he has little respect. His "handler," an agent of the state expected to monitor his activities and push him toward writing projects that suit the state's interests, seems unreasonably focused on the writer's decision to pick up, then discard a partial copy of a Proust novel the9 found abandoned along the front lines of the conflict in Syria. And another dear friend, an artist, is musing about her own possibilities for martyrdom just as she's gaining the global respect that remained out of reach for most of her life.

Out of Mesopotamia exists at an intersection of personal, national, and global confusion that defies understanding. Yet, one wants to understand and one feels compelled to keep reading. Salar Abdoh's writing voice is both unadorned and compelling—a voice one longs to stay in contact with once an initial contact has been made.

The best analogy I can come up with is that reading Out of Mesopotamia felt like finding myself in an unfamiliar room with many doors leading out of it. Abdoh allows me to see the doors, but I never quite get to know what's on the other side of any of them. And that unknowing winds up feeling purposeful because Abdoh's brilliance carries me along on a journey that wasn't written to make sense to me, but that I very much want to plumb for the sense I can find in it.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own.

[Tonstant Weader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of Mesopotamia is one of those rare books that I know I will read again and again. The prose is beautiful, the emotions raw and authentic in their confusion and contradiction. It is everything a true war story must be, contradictory, confusing, and full of love.

Saleh is a writer in Tehran who is officially an art critic, reluctantly a plot writer for the most popular TV series, and inexorably a war chronicler on the Iraqi and Syrian fronts against ISIS. He has served as a war correspondent in the past, but this time he is there cooking for the soldiers and editing the journals and notes of the martyrs.

The official censor/interrogator assigns him a task on the front, to search for a martyr who may be still alive. People are always asking him to do things, to write reviews, to go to the front, to take someone else to the front, to help them live and die. And he, he doesn’t know exactly what he wants other than to be at the front where life seems to have something ineffable, nothing so rich as meaning or purpose, but perhaps urgency.

We hear so little from the people actually fighting ISIS. From the Iranians with whom we are loosely allied in the battle against the Islamic State, we hear even less. Even if this were not such an excellent book, it would bring us a fresh perspective on an important war. But it is excellent in every way a book can be. Well written with an intriguing plot and big ideas.

Early in the book, the author references Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried though not by name, paraphrasing from How to Tell a True War Story, one of the stories in that collection. By calling in Tim O’Brien, Abdoh invites comparison, a bold thing to do. The Things They Carried is one of those books that will still be read and admired in a hundred years. Reading, I saw several references to O’Brien’s work. When his interrogator H sends him to look for Proust, I thought of Going After Cacciato” and even Paris plays the same role as a refuge. There is a death that immediately brought to mind the death of Curt Lemon, told and retold in story after story. There even is the same discontinuity of time from chapter to chapter.

To say I loved Out of Mesopotamia is an understatement. I know it is a book I will treasure because it says more in its few pages than most books five times its size.

Out of Mesopotamia will be released on September 1st. I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing.

Out of Mesopotamia at Akashic Books

Salar Abdoh Faculty Page

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre...

[Troy Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thrilling read with surprising depth told through the impaired but insightful eyes of an eternal outsider, Out of Mesopotamia is an illuminating and gripping war novel with a reality built on journalistic detail and with the imagination and craft of fiction. The way that Remembrance of Things Past threads through this story works seamlessly and speaks to the broad scope of this novel, its theme of crashing cultures, and the absurdities and miraculous beauty of a war zone. The hunger for the battlefield for the men and women who fight, serve, and die in Syria and Iraq in this book is palpable and contrasts sharply with the hypocrisy, backbiting, and anxiety of peacetime in Tehran. But no one here gets the luxury of submerging completely in any one passion or environment, and the theme of crashing cultures is captured in the narrator's thought, "I do not know how many worlds a person can live simultaneously before they lose themselves completely." Heroes and tragedies, martyrdom, TV melodrama, news reporting, and social media mix on the page, revealing the spin that mediates between reality and its presentation in both the US and Iran. Meanwhile, characters from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, France, and the US fill the pages, delivering a global perspective that sheds light on corruption as well as the potential for human connection.

[litost · Rating 4 out of 5]

A black comedy written by an Iranian author. I felt at a disadvantage as I did not have the necessary context. I did not know about the Iranian Defenders of Holy Places who fought to protect Shia shrines in Iraq against the Islamic State. Though the war is the least of it. The cynical protagonist, who I enjoyed, uses the war as an escape from the State which controls his life; he is freer in the war-zone - though mostly free to die. An interesting novel.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

The library lately has been all too eager to accommodate international reading, albeit conditionally, certain locations more than others. This one was geopolitically unmissable, a firsthand experience inspired first person account of the neverending war in the region from a Middle eastern perspective. Our narrator, an Iranian learned man, a journalist, a sometimes TV writer, not a typical soldier material at all, and yet finds himself time and again amidst not just some of the worst fighting, but also some of the strangest quiet interludes of the war in Iraq and Syria. Because he is so categorically not a man of war by nature, the book provides the most singular perspective on war itself, the tedium and absurdity of it, the surreal quality, the people who find themselves fighting or just in the areas and the reasons why. It’s quite unlike any sort of a traditional war narrative, in fact it’s quite unlike the sort of thing you’d expect from an Iranian book, for one thing it’s radically critical of the conflict. No surprise that then author, just like the other Iranian author I’ve read before, is living abroad, at least some of the time. Distance in this case good for both perspective and safety. But what a book this was, short, but certainly not light in any other way and yet very compelling in it own way. Darkly humorous in a very unexpected way, the narrator’s ability to tumble through one horrifying scenario after another with a sort of amused bewilderment, especially when it comes to all the politics of martyrdom. This book amplifies the downtime of fighting, gives voice to the silences and silent and the silenced, it presents the war (this war, maybe any war) as an absurdity, a sort of fundamental failure of reason. For this alone, the book is worth a read. Such an original perspective. Plus it is well written and oddly dynamic, featuring a diverse cast of idiosyncratic characters. A great chronicle of terrible times. First rate tragicomic dramatic literary fiction.Recommended.

[Murtaza]

Good novel, seemed to description of real events.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

An oddly appealing little book. Although it is purportedly the tale of an Iranian journalist embedded with a unit fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq, it is really a comic novel about contemporary life in Iran and the struggles of an intellectually-inclined writer in a chaotic and unsympathetic environment. The book is not about Iranian politics, though it is politics that shapes every moment of his life. His "minder," the intelligence official who maintains contact with him to insure he doesn't wander far from the approved political path, is not a particularly fearsome character and at points morphs into a kind of muse, sharing philosophically ambiguous snatches from Proust. For anyone who knows the Iranian fascination with philosophy, this is not as far-fetched as it might appear. In fact, the reactions of the protagonist to the twists and turns of fate, as well as those of his companions, is a sort of genial primer about life in today's Iran. That is not surprising since the author is himself Iranian and divides his time between Iran and teaching classes at NYU. The story casually reveals a life of art and literature going on beneath the surface of an Iran where everyone has to scramble and make compromises just to survive. This is a marvelous antidote to the cartoonish images of Iran spouted by the US government and much of the media. Here, that alternative reality is presented by a likable character who approaches his complicated life with a sardonic grin and not a whiff of self-pity.

[Ally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Salar Abdoh is a very skilled writer and knows how to set a mood. This is my third book by him and he tends to move into a book slowly, grappling with a particular topic that he plunges into from every angle. The novel then speeds up with a frenetic energy, to eventually, gently, end. This book in particular embraced a mood of anger and hopelessness - and while I may not know the experience of the main character, I truly feel like I am standing next to him in his simmering rage as he experiences the war in Iran, Syria, and Iraq.

The book exams the topics of martyrdom, religion and war, and finding purpose. I learned from this book, and like all of his narratives, I felt keenly the claustrophobia of being trapped in a space that keeps defining you even as you attempt to rewrite these definitions.

I’m huge in character-driven books and I appreciate rougher literary styles, so this was a win for me.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

This was a bizarre book that reminded me of Catch-22 in its endless depictions of pointless war. It was definitely more entertaining and far less repetitive, but just as depressing and difficult to follow, with timelines jumping around and no rhyme or reason to what was happening. Of course, I think that was the author's intent: to depict the pointlessness of war, and especially of the endless wars happening in Mesopotamia. I found the whole thing to just leave me feeling hopeless and, though I managed to finish, I never really wanted to pick this book up when I put it down. 3 stars because the author definitely achieved the goal of describing the pointless nature of the endless wars in Mesopotamia, 2 stars for my utter lack of enjoyment (but still finishing it). So, 2.5 stars overall.

[Allen Spahni · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poignant and thoughtful read that emphasizes the pointlessness, chaos, and sheer stupidity of war and shows the bravery of people who participate in it, some under coercion from their own beliefs and others who simply can’t walk away from it. By the end of I felt as if I knew many of the characters and could understand their motivations even if I couldn’t condone them. A brilliant read that I couldn’t put down and would suggest to anyone.

[Sanjida · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short novel borrows its style from the existentialist character meanderings of a Camus, or Faulkner (or Proust?). But it's all it's own thing, an instant classic about the recent conflicts against a group known only as "the enemy" in Syria and Iraq, told through the perspective of Iranian writer, correspondent, fighter and would-be martyr, romantic, and coward.

[Liza]

Got to page 205 before acknowledging to myself that I just didn’t care about this book.

[Gabriela · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF, even though it’s a short book. I managed to read over half of it but I was never able to understand what was happening and I didn’t care for the characters. I guess this book just wasn’t for me.

[Christina_lambert · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I’m sure some would appreciate the opportunity to understand both the cultural of war and more specifically of martyrdom among Arab men...I found this book hard to read. It read like it was written with more formal English, making the reading tiresome, and the story order was jumbled in a way I couldn’t always follow. I also never felt any empathy or understanding for any of the characters. So while I do feel like I took a few things away from this book from a pure sociological standpoint, reading it was a chore.

[S.K. Conaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful writing…

The line that for me sums up the feeling you get from this story and the writing style is: ‘What trauma? I don’t have any trauma.’ And as it falls drily and with candour off the lips of an Iranian war correspondent, the last image in his mind of starving children scavenging amid the rubble of a smouldering city and the leg of his friend—only the leg—he sees dangling from beneath the shroud as they carry away the body through the settling crumbs of cement, wiped from the skyline by another zealous martyr, this one line sums up a novel that turns the page on one trauma only to present the next in the same calm tone you might be asked what you take in your coffee.

But that’s just it: the disconnect; the fantasy and the horror of it; the senselessness of war and continued war and man’s need to always be at war, when the children suffer starvation and loss and still manage to play footie between the landmines and the scattered buildings and bodies; the deep down necessity to focus on normal mundane daily activities when the heightened awareness, the adrenaline of wondering when the next person with nothing left to live for will walk through the door wearing a cardigan, which reminds you of your grandfather, packed with explosives.

In stark relatable dialogue, Abdoh brings us to the fringes to sit behind the protective glass of a cosy Starbucks while we watch the horror unfold in the streets of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, as we scroll through stories on our phones and the reporters enchant us with rich, vibrant language that transports us… as we watch the tv series that will twist and turn the plot of facts into something more palatable to boost viewership… but oh, we feel like we can relate now, now we know, now we feel like we were there too, now we feel like we can also have an opinion…as we sip that skinny-decaf-latte-hold-the-whipped-cream...

At times melancholic, often tragic, with bouts of hope strewn recklessly amid the preposterous, Abdoh draws a contrast between modern Western life and freedoms, and the rigid yet raging realities of things we see every day on the news from the Middle East in a never-ending barrage of wars and rumours of wars.

Such captivating writing. Reminiscent in bits of Hemingway in style and content, a war correspondent with a tendency towards being a philosopher of few words, making sudden bald pronouncements at the end of probing monologues.

I smiled a lot while reading this, which worries me, since it was so so sad…

[Annie Yotova · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Iranian journalist, Saleh, ends up at the front lines of the war in Iraq and Syria - repeatedly. Despite the fact that he is actually an art critic - in the craziness that was ISIS, such details did not matter much. In between his trips there, he deals with the backstabbing world of journalism (and censorship) in Tehran. The story weaves between the two - the peaceful Tehran and the martyrdom at the border cannot offer a bigger contrast on paper. Except that reality is a lot more complicated.

The novel is not the usual story of a reporter at war - these had been done. But then this war was not really like any other. Saleh chooses his own path more often than not and ends up part of a war that noone seems to believe in anymore. It is a cynical take on what was happening there but it also rings true.

I would have called the novel absurd but its sheer absurdity in places makes it sound real - from the old painter who wants to die and ends up in Samarra to the guy who goes to war with Proust in his backpack, from the state interrogator who starts quoting Proust to the marriage proposal that comes to late, from fighters citing Arabic poetry to a French man with a death wish - it all makes sense in a weird sort of way.

The style takes awhile to get used to - the prose switches between almost lyrical to almost crude and back and just like the style, the story itself jumps between times and people. The story is also full of Persian philosophy and regional history - and I suspect I missed some of it - the text assumes you already know it. That makes some part read dryer than they would read to someone who recognizes the references but they are as important as the war itself for what really is happening over there.

It wasn't always an easy novel to read but if you are in the mood for a war novel, give this one a try.

[Aryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The unrelenting war in the Middle East, spurred by the United States’ War on Terror, is rapidly approaching the two decade mark. Out of Mesopotamia takes readers to Iran and the war zones of Iraq and Syria with Saleh, an Iranian journalist. Normally an art critic and writer for a state-sponsored television drama about a heroic sniper, Saleh has embedded with various militias, serving as a war journalist. Saleh doesn’t want to die at the front, but he also cannot help wanting to go back. Returning to everyday life where political machinations and family matters dominate after time at the front is jarring and in many ways seems trivial, but when he gets back to the front, things don’t make any more sense or have much more meaning than they did back in Tehran.

Reader beware: the page count may be low, but this is a very dense book. The opening of the novel firmly established the tone of the rest of the book, but at the expense of the plot. Even once the plot gets going, there’s something about the tone and style that makes Saleh’s emotions seem flat for the majority of the book, as if he’s managed to remove himself from his own story and is reporting on his life as an outsider. This is an excellent choice for book groups that want to really tear into a book’s symbolism and structure, readers with more of an interest in narrative may want to look elsewhere.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for an honest review.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Out of Mesopotamia


An exciting war story that is also darkly comedic. It is about an Iranian journalist fighting an unidentified enemy in Syria and Iraq who struggles to make find his balance in an uncertain and dangerous world.

The short book is also a comic novel about Iranian life--the writer is Iranian and lives in both Iran and the U.S. where he teaches at NYU.

I felt at a disadvantage in not knowing more about Iranian life and culture. I had to accept the portrait of Iranian culture as presented by the author. I understood the book as showing the struggles of an intellectual in an anti-intellectual world. The protagonist is a dreamer (A struggle with which I can identify; although my society does not—yet—punish intellectuals, there is certainly an environment that is unsympathetic to what it considers, disparagingly, “elites”). I also found the shifting perspectives difficult to keep straight so I was frequently confused.

What I understood, I enjoyed. While brief, the book provides a great deal to think about. I enjoyed the intellectual content as well as the humor. However, I did find reading it such a challenge I almost gave up several times.

On the whole, I felt it was worth reading but I hope his next novel is both more accessible and gives greater context for those of us without extensive knowledge of Iran.

I received this book through Library.Thing.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first, I put Out of Mesopotamia by Salar Abdoh on my list of most disliked books. Not that it isn’t well written; it is. It does an excellent job of portraying its subject matter. That is the problem. This is a book about the Middle East and why men go there to wage war and die as martyrs.

I don’t like books, or movies, about war, but the summary I read didn’t alert me strongly enough, and there I was with a purchased book and an agreement to read it for a book group, so I struggled through. By the end, I found this novel and the questions it raised compelling. What is it that has to be missing in life for someone young and healthy to prefer death? What is it exactly that we want to live our lives for?

In the story, the martyrs-to-be are religious, but I didn’t see that as the underlying motive for their desire. The author explores the other reasons that have brought this group to “this place of assisted suicide,” to fight one chaotic senseless battle after another and to find a kind of peace in doing so. The dismal scenes are balanced by the unexpected presence of poetry and art, brought to the space by artists, journalists, and the soldiers themselves.

If you would like to read more of my reviews, check out my blog at Old Ladies Read and More, https://oldladiesread.com

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A review on the front cover of my copy of this book describes it as capturing "the absurdity of both the battlefield and modern life". And I am inclined to agree. This book was absurd in the most somber way possible. I can't say I wasn't captivated by it, because I very much was, but I will say that I do not fully understand it. The last sentence of this book has a meaning I cannot quite grasp, a depth I wish I could measure.

Our main character is very much a real person, and while he annoyed me a little bit, in regards to his treatment of Atia, it did not take away negatively from the book. He is desensitized, it feels, to the war going on around him, which is a little trippy as a reader who is taking it in from his perspective but who has not gone through the same experiences. It really feels like a snapshot out of someone's life, put together very well, for the small moment in time that we get with Saleh.

I lacked a lot of context and understanding for what was happening in this story, which is my own fault for not being educated on the matter, and I have a feeling that returning to re-read this with a full (or fuller) understanding of the conflict would improve an already solid reading experience.

[Liselotte Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

För några veckor sedan läste jag en roman om en kvinna som går i kloster och slåss mot möss. Den fick, helt absurt, en fyra.
Det är lite samma känsla när jag kryper mig in i Abdohs roman; En olyckligt kär, halvblind krigskorrespondent hoppar runt i Iran och Iraq och ser människor bombas till bitar och bli martyrer- yay, liksom... Jag kommer inte kunna förklara det här betyget, så är det. Jag kommer inte heller kunna förklara historien, för jag erkänner att jag har alldeles för dålig insikt i mellanöstern och allt som hänt och händer, och kommer nog aldrig förstå hur människor kan använda religion som motivation för att dö och dödas.
Men Abdoh förklarar, men sin cyniska och samtidigt djupt inkännande huvudperson, ändå en del av det. Just cynismen är nog det som gör det, apatin och det absurda i att leva i krigets helvete går nästan att relatera till, när den utmattade och alltför erfarna journalisten växlar mellan att göra te åt villiga martyrer och att skriva krigssåpor till statstv.
En sån där bok man inte väljer, utan ramlar över. För några år sedan hade jag inte tagit mig igenom den. Och varken den, eller klosterboken, hade fått höga betyg. Jag vet inte vad det säger om mig - men Abdoh säger i alla fall något (mer än vad jag förmår förstå) om mänskligheten.

[Medusa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book to be a fresh-to-Western-eyes take on the flip side, in a way, of the Forever Wars against Terror (as well as the deep fatigue and destruction brought about by war). I say that as one who has read pretty widely and deeply in this area. The narrator is Iranian, a writer and sometimes correspondent who becomes addicted to being adjacent to war - in this case, the fight against ISIS - and, as the Islamic world views them, “martyrs.” He works at a Mokeb (something like a field kitchen / hospitality unit) for Hashd fighters, who may be, and are, barbarous, but their barbarism is in the service of “protecting the holy places” from the predations and martyrdoms of Isis fighters. I think the author stumbles a bit here and there, perhaps most at the ending - though I am not even sure what a better ending would have looked like, and maybe that’s the point - but overall this is a war novel that manages something fresh among all the soul emptying of war, and the (to borrow Ackerman’s phrase) Misfits, Mercenaries, and Missionaries who go to war. Abdoh sketches and creates some extremely memorable characters and some extremely difficult situations, and this book will stay with me for a long time.

[Matthew Petti · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great novel, would read and re-read any day. It shows the contemporary civil war in Iraq and Syria from a perspective we don't often hear — the pro-Iranian one — and has a much more pessimistic view of Iran's middle-class liberals than one would expect.

Abdoh's narrator is a fish out of water everywhere he goes. On the front lines, he's a jaded, secular, physically soft litterateur among religious warriors. Yet his brushes with death and the enemy make him alien to the shallow, materialistic intellectuals of Tehran. And he keeps running into other oddballs: a government censor who clearly hates his job, a French adventure seeker in an unexpected corner of Iraq, an artist who would rather die than carry on dealing with rich Iranians, etc.

Definitely read it if you want an interesting view of the Middle East that you wouldn't get elsewhere.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the purpose of this fictional memoir is to condemn all wars; to show on a personal level why and in what personal ways war is irrational; to expose the reasons why people continue to seem to want to fight and be killed. The reader can almost see Saleh, the narrator shaking his head in wonder as he tells about his comrades on the front lines between Iraq and Syria. And also as he watches him self be drawn back into helping with the war for way too long.
This is not a fun book to read--there is probably too many details. But it is enlightening

[Larry Epp · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it to get through. 40ish Iranian journalist on the front lines of the Iraq/Syria mess. The enemy, his fellow fighters --savage, stupid, deadly, wanna be martyrs, boredome. Back in Tehran, he faces pressures from his "handler" and rejection from the woman he loves. He ghost writes for Iranian TV. Interesting to see a war story from this angle. But, plot is too often interrupted by longish observations that I often skimmed.

[J.G.P. MacAdam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Then what's it all for? What are we doing all this for?" —Shorty, an Iranian martyr-to-be, in Iraq, somewhere on the border with Syria, circa 2014-15, fighting on the ground against ISIS, as portrayed by Salar Abdoh in his unputdownable novel "Out of Mesopotamia" based on his experiences as a journalist. A practically universal reflection on combat by combatants regardless of nationality or time period, it seems. I dogeared damn near the whole book. 👍

(I got a used advanced reader copy)

[Daniel Weaver · Rating 3 out of 5]

A journalist’s view of his life and the war against ISIS pivoting to the front lines in Syria and back to Tehran. I didn’t find his story and perspectives as compelling as I would have liked as a cynical (about the war, about Iran, about his future) journalist. But an interesting view into what drives voluntary participation in a brutal war

[Sharolyn Stauffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A war novel from a unique perspective. Gripping writing and symbolism. I especially was intrigued by the narrator's eye problems and the times he could not see clearly that intertwined with intriguing battle tales. A slew of interesting characters and their motivations brought the absurdity of war to center.