Dorothea Dieckmann's short novel, Guantanamo, easily makes, if not tops, my list of best books published 2007. In fact, I'm going to pull out some tired old war horses here: It grabs you from the first page. It is masterfully written. It is a "must read." Most important, it is important.[return][return]Guantanamo does what excellent fiction should do -- transport us to places we can't go. Here, that place is inside the mind of a prisoner at the U.S. military's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Rashid is a 20-year old nonpracticing Muslim born and raised in Germany. He is half Indian and half German. He travels to Dehli to meet his grandmother and eventually befriends a young Afghan who takes him to Pakistan. Rashid gets caught up in the midst of an anti-American demonstration, is arrested and ends up at Gitmo.[return][return]Those are the "facts" (or are they?) of how Rashid ended up being a prisoner of the U.S. military. While the facts (or Rashid's memory) may occasionally blur, Dieckmann's exploration of the mind is as clear and expressive as you can find. Guantanamo, first published in Germany in 2004 and translated by Tim Mohr for last year's U.S. edition, takes us inside Rashid's thoughts, memories and emotions. The physical effects of his arrest, treatment, imprisonment and interrogations are certainly part and parcel of this -- and described in haunting detail. But this is as much an investigation of the psyche, one that is equally as haunting. Dieckmann's concise yet eloquent prose takes us on a harrowing journey that at times borders on a fever dream. She relies on public descriptions of the base and conditions there for the story's framework but, as she notes, "As regards the inner details, only imagination can provide those[.]"[return][return]Balance of review at here.

Random purchase from the library weeding. Not the most christmassy choice I have ever made. Got rather lost in some of the sequences though this is probably the idea

The last of my reads of the 11 past winners of the Best Translated Book Award.

Guantanamo was translated by Tim Mohr from Dorothea Dieckmann's German language original:



It was something of a surprise winner of the inaugural Best Translated Book Award in 2008. It beat off competition from, amongst others, [b:The Savage Detectives|63033|The Savage Detectives|Roberto Bolaño|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1342651149s/63033.jpg|2503920] by the renowned Roberto Bolaño, [b:Out Stealing Horses|398323|Out Stealing Horses|Per Petterson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1317791439s/398323.jpg|3321103] and [b:Omega Minor|1742699|Omega Minor|Paul Verhaeghen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348245936s/1742699.jpg|1740354], the latter two both winners of the UK equivalent Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Original published in 2004, the novel was written at a time when few details of life inside Guantanamo were available to the public and the impact of the novel, read in 2018, is a little diminished by the first hand accounts that have since emerged.

Nevertheless this is an impressive work of the imagination (and what research was achievable at the time). Narrated in the 3rd person but from the perspective of Rashid, a prisoner in the camp, Dieckmann's fractured prose does an excellent job of capturing both the physical discomfort and the psychological disorientation caused by the conditions within which the prisoner's are kept.

It never stops. Day and night, in every light, in every waking second, it can hit him and drag him back - back to the point before which he can't remember anything. Deaf, blind and unable to move, stuck rehashing the beginning of it all. Each time he tries to get back to before his arrival here, searching for a way out. But the nightmare just plays out the same way all over again, and he lands on his knees exactly like the men in front of him, again and again.

Rashid - at least in his own self-account - is innocent, not a terrorist or even a fundamentalist sympathiser, not even an Islamic believer, having travelled from his home in Hamburg, Germany to India to visit his grandmother, and then armed with nothing more offensive than a Lonely Planet Guide, going on to travelling in India and Pakistan, eventually ending up near to the Afghan border where is he caught up in an anti-American demonstration and arrested. I have seen suggestions Dieckmann was inspired by the case of Khalid El-Masri, or at least that it gained her book attention, and in one sense the decision to focus on a potentially innocent victim to be slightly weakens the book, since it is an equally valid question as to whether the techniques used in Guantanamo are humane or even effective when used on those who have committed violent acts.

But Dieckmann leaves the reader some ambiguity as Rashid is confused in his own mind, still disorientated as to how a trip to see his family has left him in a American prison camp, and his interrogators offer him an alternative explanation for his own account:

He worries about them—about the words he says—and about the possibility that they will come back to him altered, changed into something else, something dangerous.

he starts to question what is true and what he, or they, have imagined (he wasn't sure anymore which ones were real). And he starts to take comfort in the words of the Quran with which he has been provided on the assumption he is a pious believer.

But all Rashid really wants to do is go home, except that he gradually realises that the camp authorities haven't really given thought to that element:

It wasn't anybody's job to release prisoners—that there was no plan, not even a secret one.

Overall, a book I found impressive but perhaps which didn't quite grab me emotionally as much as I expected. This review captures better the issue I had:
http://quarterlyconversation.com/guatanamo-by-dorothea-dieckmann-review

And seen 10 years later, the BTBA award looks an odd choice compared to others on the shortlist, albeit the decision was made not by a jury, but rather by a vote of readers of the Three Percent website.

3.5 stars, rounded to 3 for now.