The Tobacco Keeper

The plot is laid out for the reader in the book's first chapter. Well and good, but can the writer really make it work? The answer is NO. An acclaimed musician lives in three different countries under three different names and mostly gets away with it. Sounds implausible and exciting? Instead the telling of the tale is tedious and the author was not able to convince this reader that there was any chance such a story could play out without snagging itself and unraveling. I'm always amazed that publishers these days think all it takes is a good first chapter and the rest of the book can drift down hill into Truly Boring. Interesting only for its description of the Green Zone in Iraq.

Maybe it was the translation, but this book was terrible. Disconnected and unnecessary descriptive passages. Strange and unfamiliar phrasing..Also what was it about anyway.

In this complex, challenging, and unconventional novel, Iraqi author Ali Bader takes on nothing less than the ethnic and political history of the Middle East from 1926 - 2006 for his scope. An unnamed Iraqi writer has been asked by USA Today News to travel to Baghdad to ghostwrite an article about the murder of Kamal Medhat, an eighty-year-old Iraqi violinist. The Press Cooperation Agency and AC Media & News group also want a full-length biography of Kamal Medhat, however, and they will pay all the speaker's expenses and supply him with files and documents for the eventual biography which he will write under his own name.To call this book a murder mystery, as it is called on Amazon, is like calling Joyce's Ulysses a travel guide to Dublin. Kamal Medhat, it turns out, is one of three completely different identities and separate cultural backgrounds used by the same man, the only common thread being his virtuosic skill at the violin, and the ghostwriter is hard pressed to follow the violinist's trail as he moves through Iraq, Iran, Syria, Russia, and even Czechoslovakia. "Yousef Sami Saleh," the earliest identity, is a Jewish resident of Baghdad from 1920 - 1953; "Haidar Salman" lives in Tehran as a Shia, then returns to Baghdad in 1958, and after a coup, escapes back to Tehran before moving to Moscow; and "Kamal Medhat Mustafa," an Iraqi Baathist, has to deal with the Iran-Iraq War, the rise of Saddam Hussein, the Second Gulf War (the invasion of Kuwait), and the Third Gulf War, launched by the US.Author Ali Bader has long been fascinated with metaphysics and views of identity, as he has previously demonstrated in his novel Papa Sartre, and he uses the violinist's three personas with their different personalities, in direct parallel with the three personas used by Fernando Pessoa in his poetry book The Tobacco Shop, selections of which begin the novel and echo throughout. The author continues the metaphysical parallels by suggesting that similarly, three different identities pervade and overlap among the Middle Eastern countries of Iraq, Iran, and Syria, with Israel providing yet another set of characteristics and identity, and that it is these competing ideas of their own national identity which are responsible for the succession of wars among these countries.Carefully organized thematically, the novel is unconventional in style. The first thirty pages resemble a dissertation on Middle Eastern history, creating the feeling that this is complex non-fiction, and it is challenging to a reader unfamiliar with this history. Some confusion also results because the journalist-speaker is "reporting about," rather than bringing a character to life the way one expects in fiction. The main character's story feels like a biography, more than fiction. While this semi- journalistic style allows the author to tell about many issues, it also means that one does not "get inside" the characters. The author walks a fine line here among genres, since his use of parallels between the three-part main character, the three personas in Pessoa's The Tobacco Shop, and the interconnected histories of the countries involved are needed to provide a broader, more universal thematic context than one gets in biographies. Ultimately, the author writes a novel of broad import from a unique point of view, making it understandable to the western reader despite the complexity of the historical record underlying the story. Challenging but filled with rewarding insights into the history of this region. Mary Whipple

The novel is too long and boring sometimes. I read both the Arabic and the English versions. I feel that there are many unnecessary details. Also, I feel that the novel is a book of history rather than fiction. Bader is really intelligent and his language is great, however, the novel would be more interesting if he were concise. Indeed, it can be rewritten in less that 200 pages.

Ali Bader's Tobacco Keeper is a captivating novel, in which a journalist uncovers the life - or should I say the lives – of a musician born in Baghdad.Besides exploring identities and secrets lives, the writer offers us a rare perspective of the region and the political climate in the Middle East in the second part of the 20th century.In the Independent, an article summarizes it as follow : “A fascinating tangle of multiple identities and forgotten histories”.