It’s clear right from the outset that Shimon is a larger-than-life character, meeting his problems and the various twists of fate with humour and resilience. A love of cinema saves him on one occasion from being shot. But real life actors and film directors wander into the Parisian section of the narrative: Marcello Mastroianni, Jean-Luc Goddard, Marco Ferreri and others. They appear in fleeting glimpses, on the street or in cafés. Meanwhile, Shimon meets many others in exile, from the Arab world and elsewhere. Many of these people too are vibrant personalities, or maybe it’s just the irrepressible writing style of Shimon that brings them so much to life. All sorts of bizarre episodes befall him throughout the book. And he doesn’t hold back where his romantic and sexual escapades are concerned. When he took a fancy to a young woman in Paris, he pretended he worked in cinema and that Robert de Niro was staying in his apartment. Whenever she visited, he would retreat briefly to another room, and pretend to talk with de Niro who, of course, was never able to come out and meet her. Shimon wakes up one morning to find the woman gone and the door to “de Niro’s room” open. She’d sussed out that it was all a ruse, but the note she leaves him indicates she is more amused than anything.

Shimon himself, as he points out more than once in the book, is an Assyrian Christian. He’s Iraqi but not an Arab. The second narrative, ‘The Street Boy and the Cinema’ helps to fill in something of the diverse ethnic mix of Iraq. Though brought up Christian, the young Shimon, on fearing that the relatives of a snake he’s killed will seek him out for revenge, uses verses from the Koran.

Film plays a big part in the young Shimon’s life. He sells sorbet outside the local cinema, and shares a love of John Ford films with local cinema buff, Kiryakos who also once dreamed of going to Hollywood to make films. In fact Shimon loves cinema in general, including Norman Wisdom films which are extremely popular with the locals. Shimon fills out the backgrounds of his family and neighbours, their disputes, their love affairs, and builds up a memorable picture of life in pre-Ba’athist Iraq.

Both narratives are full of dark episodes, detailing life on the streets of Paris, and a childhood of relative poverty, and yet Shimon writes with such humour and optimism that he makes the whole book a delight to read. By the end of the second narrative, Shimon’s family and others of Assyrian, Kurdish, Turkomen and Persian origin are forced out of their homes after the Ba’athist coup. The new regime sees their ethnic groups as being associated with the last remnants of the former occupying power, the British. It’s a poignant end as Shimon’s family is gradually broken up, siblings marrying or being conscripted.

’An Iraqi in Paris’ offers interesting insights into the diversity of Arabic cultures and nations and the truth behind the Islamic monoculture so often portrayed in the Western media. It’s a thoroughly engaging book with an irrepressible narrator.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.