I’m hoping to complete my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge this year. I want each book to be written by someone from that country and so at this stage I need to actively seek the books rather than just see what comes into my path. However, The Baghdad Villa by Zuheir el-Hetti (2016, transl. Samira Kawar 2023) did turn up in my local charity bookshop, helping me to add Iraq to my list.

Set in 2003 after the American invasion and toppling of Saddam Hussein, the narrative is from the point of view of Ghosnelban, a young woman from an aristocratic family who is racketing around the titular building, remembering the glory days of her relatives as life outside the grounds changes beyond all recognition.

“We had been brought up according to strict rules of speech and behaviour. The use of words that breached the limits of politeness and respect was prohibited. We had carefully preserved that strict moral linguistic code, which we shared with our few gradually vanishing acquaintances and relatives, fearing that its demise would signal the loss of our identity.”

Ghosnelban’s only company is her one remaining member of staff, the housekeeper Mamluka, and her brother Silwan, who is very unwell.

“He had been a soldier in an army that had been epically crushed in the battle to free the oil-rich desert. He came back to us, but did not return, because he had left his mind there, on the road between Basra and Nasiriya. He came back filled with horrifying nightmares, leaving behind all that was human. Then he began to endlessly narrate what he had experienced and seen on that accursed road, like an endless black waterfall.”

Ghosnelban knows her situation is unsustainable. At the start of the novel she receives a bullet in the post – a warning to leave her home or be killed. She meditates on seven artworks on the walls, Masters collected by her grandfather, each painting giving its name to a chapter in the book.

Ghosnelban is not likable. She is an elitist who freely admits to othering people who are not like her “Truly, did the lives of such human beings have meaning?” At the same time, clinging onto her elitism in the face of overwhelming destruction of her way of life is an act of defiance and resistance.

“I was, after all, the descendant of a highborn family and had learned to sculpt hatred and to turn it into a lethal weapon that I threw everyone to confront the vulgarity prevailing around me.”

As much as I didn’t like Ghosnelban, her voice was so distinctive and strongly evoked from the start, I was quicky drawn into her story. And as this develops, of course she becomes more complex than the superior, condescending snob the reader is initially introduced to.

She finds freedom in a friendship with sex worker Regina:

“I wanted to escape my own skin into which I had been placed by my family and it’s ancient history. She didn’t know who I was, was completely ignorant of my family’s history… and was totally uninterested in lineage.”

We also learn of Ghosnelban’s experience of love and passion with someone whose position makes the match entirely unsuitable. Perhaps it is this that encourages her to try and find who is when not defined by her family:

“My grandparents seemed supremely elegant, but cheerless. Their gazes expressed a hauteur that seemed natural to them, two people who never allowed colourful emotions to draw close […. ] Tears were an absolutely forbidden weakness. Displays of yearning were cheap. Love was demonstrated through action, not mawkishness; smiling was a feeling, not a meaningless stretching of the lips. We had learned that list by heart, and I remembered it nostalgically.”

While Ghosnelban seems to retreat into inaction, gazing at her grandfather’s paintings and reflecting, el-Hetti brilliantly builds the sense of impending threat and violence from which she cannot escape. Ghosnelban is not stupid and she knows she has to take a decision or inaction becomes a decision. For such a reflective, interior narrative, The Baghdad Villa becomes unbearably tense.

The Baghdad Villa is a compelling, complex character study which widens to explore the impact on individuals during moments of rapid societal and political change.  It demonstrates how moments of great humanity can exist in the most extreme circumstances; as well as the extremes to which human beings can be driven.

Much to my surprise, it became a real page-turner as I hoped Ghosnelban wouldn’t be destroyed along with her family’s villa. On finishing, I knew I was really going to miss Ghosnelban’s snooty, fierce and vulnerable voice.