Papa Sartre
 The novel opens with two charlatans commissioning a biographical novel. A starving academic is hired to write the life story of an Existential philosopher who died in the late 1960s and was acclaimed as the (Sartre of Baghdad). Father Hanna and his sexy consort, Nunu Bihar, are pragmatic and clear from the very beginning: philosophy is a business and the narrator’s assignment is to create a larger than life Iraqi equivalent of the original Jean Paul Sartre. The would-be narrator is introduced to a third party; the project’s funding supreme, Sadeq Zadeh, whose remit is to approve the version of the philosopher’s death. He is then handed dossiers of documents, photographs, diaries, letters and assigned a dubious research assistant, who looks more like a pickpocket, to accompany him on interviews with the remaining few friends of the late philosopher. The charlatans demonstrate an amorality that fascinates the narrator, with their wide latitude for unconstrained heckling, irreverence and recklessness along with factual discrepancies. Not to mention the scandalously seductive nature of Nunu Bihar’s overt sexuality. A biography can, then, depicts a life with all its flaws, weaknesses and baseness, thinks the narrator. This proves difficult for him at first with collective memory being subject to strict cultural variables. He finds there were those who admired all the dead: servants overlooked and forgave mistakes, hesitated at admitting domestic scandals, attributing superhuman qualities in hagiographic proportions to those no longer living. The philosopher’s friends, on the other hand, told another story, accurate but equally flawed. They decked him out like a Christmas tree. Glossing over a sense of shame, they assigned to themselves important roles, their talk of the 1960s sounded like an elegy for a lost Paradise that had expelled its most prominent philosopher with no recognition. A solipsistic gaze constructed the only life worth living. Existentialist of Al-sadriyah Documents prove similarly discouraging for the narrator: "All spoke a single character, a unique and towering figure, one that summarized for an entire society a tragic world and symbolized for an entire notion tragic anomie" Overriding these methodological obstacles, the narrator eventually succeeds in producing a candid account of the life of Abdel Rahman Sartre’s, the Existentialist of al-Sadriyah. One day, as on many other days, the Sartre of Baghdad woke up feeling nauseous. He picked up a gilt-framed photograph of Sartre and admired the physical resemblance between them. But adoration turned to feelings of inadequacy. He glanced at the philosopher’s bad eye. "Abdel Rahman had immense faith in the philosophical bad eye, he understood its value and greatness while appreciating how difficult a condition it was attain. It was the defect of the impossible, a metaphysical defect like that of god. He experienced despair…as if something was missing in his existence…(a shortcoming) remained a heavy load on his heart, a cruel destructive feeling that he felt when he was in Paris. The reality of Abdul Rahman Sartre student days in Paris was dismal. His linguistic proficiency was such that he was unable to approach, let alone conducts a conversation with, the giant of existentialism. Incapable of learning French, he never completed his degree, his rapturous audience back in Baghdad would lovingly support Abdul Rahman , "was Sartre a philosopher because of his degree or because of his philosophy?" True. He assumed the role of witness, the man who had seen Sartre and had arrived from Paris to tell them all about him. Unable to write in either French or Arabic and incapable of concentrating for long hours or of thinking with any systematic logic, he owned the complete works of Sartre from which he would read a few lines and swoon into day-dreaming. Our philosopher despised writing as an act of estrangement ; it resembled masturbation in that it was an act of identification with words –images of nothingness-and not with nothingness itself. Speech, on the other hand represented the moment, the emotion-it was as cathartic as it was euphoric. Oral discourse was integral to the culture of the coffee house of the early 1960s in Baghdad . Most of the intellectuals of his generation pontificated endlessly over dominoes in the morning and regrouped in the local bars at night. Their knowledge of philosophy was limited to books titles and short summaries found in newspapers and literary magazines. Existentialism legitimized a way of life. "There was no reality, no reality to be understood". Abdel Rahman Sartre’s identity was locked into that world. His aristocratic background shielded his self-image; he never saw the need to work for a living, always believing that he was a speaker not a writer, a philosopher not charlatan. One of the outstanding characters in Papa Sartre is Ismael Hadoub, he first appears selling pornographic photographs in Baghdad in the mid-1950s, his most enthusiastic customer being a rich Jewish merchant, Saul, who owns a store in al Sadriyah and bargains tirelessly over prices. Saul takes on Ismail and transforms him into an obedient and grateful acolyte.