[Der falsche Inder]
Abbas Khider’s debut functions as a meta-fictional exploration of the refugee experience, structured as a found manuscript discovered on a German train. The narrative follows Rasul Hamid, an Iraqi exile fleeing the Ba’athist regime.
The book is organized into eight distinct chapters, each offering a competing or overlapping version of Rasul’s journey through prisons and across borders. This non-linear structure replicates the psychological fragmentation and the “bureaucratic performance” required of asylum seekers, who must often package their trauma into varying narratives for different authorities. Khider highlights the erosion of a stable identity. In this experience Rasul cannot figure out anymore if he is “Gypsy, Iraqi, Indian or even extraterrestrial”.
[Khider, A. (2008). Der falsche Inder. Edition Nautilus.]
Sources:
https://books.google.it/books/about/Der_falsche_Inder.html?id=6oQhAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y
