The Tobacco Keeper

How do you tell the story of modern Iraq? For novelist, film producer and war correspondent Ali Bader, it’s not enough to recount the terrible cycles of violence that have made his country unrecognizable. His fictional account of Iraq in “The Tobacco Keeper” — first published in Arabic in 2008 as “Hareth al-Tabgh” and newly out in English from Bloomsbury Qatar — is filtered through an identity that is as complex and multivalent as history itself. As an idea, it intrigues, but as a finished book, it becomes mired in its own ambition. The unnamed journalist narrator takes us through 80 years of Iraqi history, with diversions through Israel, Moscow, Iran and Syria. An ambitious and wide-ranging setting for a political tale of the Middle East, Bader’s novel is also an intensely personal and artistic one. Its central character, a musician, reflects after a performance for Saddam Hussein: “There has