This book is very much of a piece. It's it about a monster made up from pieces, it's about a city in pieces, the book itself is fragmented made up of seperate story lines all stitched together. This means the novel itself doesn't really have a strong through line, but the way Saadawi is able to convey the city of Baghdad with it's mystical Assyrian roots to it's modern burtal regimes and subsequent war as a background tapistry, and also how he threaded the notion of Frankenstien's monster into the fabric of the city and novel was intoxicating. It was an easy book to inhabbit for that reason, and it was all done with an effortlessness that I loved.