It’s not surprising that the 12 short stories in Mazen Maarouf’s first collection, Jokes for the Gunmen, largely take place in nameless, dream-like cities. Maarouf’s life has taken an unconventional path: he was born in Beirut to Palestinian parents who had fled the Lebanese war, then worked as a teacher of chemistry and physics before moving to Reykjavik, where he has become the foremost translator of Icelandic literature into Arabic. He has also written three books of poetry and two collections of short stories (the second has yet to appear in English). Jokes for the Gunmen won the AlMultaqa prize in 2016, a $20,000 pan-Arab award for the short story.
Maarouf’s unplaceable cities serve the same purpose as the locations of many of Mohsin Hamid’s novels: the reader can imagine these dark and violent places as San Salvador or Sana’a, as Ciudad Juárez or Bangui. The first, titular story, which is by some distance the longest in the collection, is told from the perspective of a young man who attempts to negotiate the arbitrary and capricious rules of life in a city where bombs rain down indiscriminately and the “gunmen” maintain an uneasy hold on power. The boy’s father, who runs a laundry, is “so weak… so cowardly”.
The unnamed boy sees a street-vendor with a glass eye who doesn’t appear to be harassed by the gunmen; he surmises that the glass eye must be some form of enchantment and sets about attempting to procure one for his father. He tries to auction off his twin brother’s organs; arranges for a “hippopotamus” (one of the tough guys at school) to guard his father; waters a pepper plant in the hope that the peppers contain the souls of his family.
These are a selection of typically bizarre ideas in a book that is full of visionary strangeness. There’s a couple who keep a blood clot named Munir in an aquarium and attempt to raise it as a child; an elderly abattoir worker who insists on dressing as a matador and each day must “choose the largest cow, pounce on it and strangle it with his bare hands”; there’s a man whose arms are blown off when a vacuum bomb falls on the bar in which he DJs and only regrow “like mushrooms” through the operation of a magical music box. The final story, Juan and Ausa, is about a pair of lovers who enter an uneasy menage a quatre with a young girl and a bull.
Sitting behind Maarouf’s work is the clear influence of one of the masters of the short form, Julio Cortázar. Like Maarouf, Cortázar grew up in a world in which the threat of violence was everywhere, where the rules governing who lived and who died appeared bafflingly unpredictable. The only response to such a monstrous existence is the kind of dark laughter that we find in Cortázar, in Beckett, in Kafka and in Brecht. Maarouf’s stories are deeply peculiar, occasionally touching and often very funny. They are also beautifully translated by Jonathan Wright, who renders Maarouf’s language in sprightly, elegant prose.
• Jokes for the Gunmen by Mazen Maarouf is published by Granta (£10.99). To order a copy for £9.67 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
