Guantanamo: A Novel (Paperback)

by Dorothea Dieckmann (Author), Tim Mohr (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Dieckmann, born in 1957, makes her U.S. book debut with this novel of prison camp survival: like Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it tracks its protagonist through routinized torture intended to crush the prisoner's psyche. Rashid Bakhrani, a 20-year-old German born of an Indian Muslim parent, is caught by raiding soldiers in an anti-American demonstration in Peshawar. He is flown home—to the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Bored and scared by turns, Rashid still hopes he can explain his arrest is a mistake before being drawn into the interrogation process, where he is subject to beatings, sensory disorientation and humiliation. Rashid's American captors have created a complete and fictitious profile for him: to them, Rashid is not a curious tourist but a jihadist connected to a Hamburg cell with plans to attack Americans. Rashid soon tells his captors what they want to hear, and then begins to take on his fictitious identity. Dieckmann makes no authorial comments about Rashid's ordeal: she simply seals the reader, like Rashid, in the camp's claustrophobic horror. Unlike Solzhenitsyn's novel, there is no sense of a great ideological chasms being opened up, but Dieckmann's close focus pays off, like a blow to the head. (Aug.)
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From Booklist
Prison literature is as old as writing itself. In her first novel, German writer Dieckmann uses a classic form, a first-person narration of an innocent man enduring brutal incarceration and torture. Rashid, 20, of Hamburg, Germany, is the son of a Muslim Indian father and a German Protestant mother. While visiting his grandmother in India, he meets a friendly Afghani. Believing that the war in Afghanistan has ended, they travel to Peshawar. Drawn unwittingly into an anti-American demonstration, Rashid is arrested, beaten, and sent to Guantánamo. The reader learns this in feverish flashbacks as Rashid––in agony from diabolical abuse, cruelly contorted, tied up, and hooded––struggles to remember the sequence of events that delivered him to hell. Dieckmann, whose cut-to-the-bone style is as spare as her hero's wire-fence cell, based her blood-chilling descriptions on real-life reports from Guantánamo. But it is Rashid, a sweet-natured young man clinging to sanity in a place of systematic madness and monstrous lawlessness, who makes this tale so devastating, and for Americans, so shameful. A powerful novel is worth a thousand news stories. Seaman, Donna

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (September 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933368543
• ISBN-13: 978-1933368542
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #927,011 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Citizen of a Lonely Planet, November 4, 2007

By	Matt Briggs "Matt Briggs" (Seattle) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Rashid, a German tourist of Indian decent, using a Lonely Planet Guide to look for an adventure in the postwar zone of Afghanistan, finds himself rounded up by American soldiers under murky circumstances. The normally lucid handles of nationality and religion dissolve as Rashid finds himself bagged, tagged an enemy, and carted to a small cage stowed in rows alongside other cages filled with men with similar varied and confusing stories. Everyone imprisoned has been reduced to an enemy combatant. In turn, the male and female American soldiers who watch over them are also reduced to the role of interrogator.

Like Beckett's Malone, this novel spends pages dwelling on the mesmerizing physical minutiae of the protagonist. He is a bundle of frayed nerves trying to cling to consciousness in a situation where any sense of context has been removed by senseless forces. In Beckett, this might be an existential crises, in Guantanomo this is Dick Cheney's war without end. Rashid watches sunlight. A gecko takes up residence behind a plywood panel. The gecko, too, is in prison, and the protagonist's imprisonment makes just as much sense. Increasingly, national boundaries only make sense for the larger multi-national structures like the World Bank. For citizens of the world, whether they are workers being detained in the United States for lacking the applicable administrative paperwork or they are tourists traveling for dubious reasons in Afghanistan it makes as much sense to imprison these people as it does to lock up geckos, spiders, and moths. This excellent short novel directly confronts the confusion of citizenship and identity in the context of Globalism where terrorism, war, or even Lonely Planet Guide tourism are not constrained by national boundaries.

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent read!, December 5, 2007

By	sam - See all my reviews

Definitely worth a read, if only to grasp the loss of self that accompanies relentless and prolonged dehumanisation.

1 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars One Side in a Propaganda War, November 24, 2007

By	Privacy - See all my reviews

A strong piece of Islamist propaganda written by someone from the far Left. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows. No mention is made of the soccer games or video movie watching.

Guantanamo is a maximum security prison and should be seen as such. It holds some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world, whose stated goals are are killing "unbelievers" by the thousands. Why these people receive sympathy and support from the Far Left is beyond understanding.