This timely, elegant novel’s hero is an Iraqi secret police inspector who routinely uses enhanced interrogation techniques, which even he considers torture. Convinced that he is protecting society from anarchy, he is at peace with the world until ordered to interrogate a childhood friend, a journalist with possible links to violent subversives. Then he falls in love with his friend’s wife. The plot of this novel, which was written in Iraq in 1976 and published in Arabic in Germany in 1989, is further complicated by street protests in Baghdad following the Six-Day Arab–Israeli War of June 1967. Despite the grim subject matter of this novel, it is at heart a love story, lyrically narrated.
The Traveler and the Innkeeper
This timely, elegant novel’s hero is an Iraqi secret police inspector who routinely uses enhanced interrogation techniques, which even he considers
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FADHIL AL-AZZAWI was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1940. He holds a Ph.D. in cultural journalism from the University of Leipzig and is the author of sev-eral novels and collections of poetry. In Iraq, he was a member of the “Kirkuk Group” of poets of the 1960s generation. He has lived in Germany since 1977. WILLIAM M. HUTCHINS is the principal translator of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (AUC Press, 1989-92), and has most recently translated Ibrahim al-Mazini’s Ten Again and other stories (AUC Press, 2006).
