The Messenger’s Story

“An account of reality is always sober and austere; reality does not have to be embellished, because it is already there.  For this reason we tend to lend unembellished narrative greater credence and it is with this that Sherko Fatah works.  His stories are so simple and clear, he keeps himself so ascetically removed from any literary razzamatazz, that one is prepared to believe his combination of the most spectacular events, as if they were indeed the effects of a mechanism purring with necessity which one might also call fate.” / Jens Jessen in Die Zeit

Sherko Fatah’s stories are set in a borderland, the borderland between Iraq and Turkey, the borderland between East and West, the borderland between origins and arrival in a new world. 

The people in his stories stride along these borders, at times sleep-walking, stoically and unflinchingly, lost and seeking shelter.  Crossing the border becomes a game of life and death, Fatah describes the escape from violence and degradation to new and only purportedly safer shores in images of great intensity.

The plot of Sherko Fatah’s new novel, The Messenger’s Story, begins in Baghdad in the Thirties of the last century.  In the midst of growing nationalism, anti-Semitism and communism, the messenger Anwar has to find his way against a background of burgeoning nationalism, anti-Semitism and communism and stumbles by accident into a Europe afflicted by war.