"Anatomy of a soldier" by Harry Parker

"Anatomy of a soldier" - Harry Parker, meeting with the author

Converses with the author Martina Head (SUR); meeting with consecutive translation thanks to Carla Toffolo.

plot:
Tom Barnes is a young British army captain in Afghanistan, during a mission jumps in the air on an improvised explosive device and lost his legs; Latif is an Afghan boy who plays in the ranks of the rebels, while Faridun, his childhood friend, tries to live peacefully in their village; even they will be spared from the ferocity of the conflict. Anatomy of a soldier tells the story - tragically ordinary - of these three characters in an extraordinarily original, through 45 chapters each narrated by an object witness of the story: a sneaker Latif, a bomb built by the guerrillas, the Faridun bike, Tom's backpack, purse her mother, saw that her leg amputated, the prosthesis that replaces him ... it is a chorus of voices devoid of sentimentality, of ideology, of topical references: what they say, by the ravvicinatissima their perspective, he is only the eternal drama of the war, with its attendant pain, destruction and death, but also the human capacity to preserve, in spite of everything, hope. An unforgettable debut novel, autobiographical in detail but the universal scope, which combines the boldness of the authority testing of a classic.

Author:
Harry Parker (1983), son of an English general who was deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, he enlisted in turn the British Army at 23 and served with the rank of captain in 2007 and in Iraq in 2009 Afghanistan, where following the explosion of a bomb he lost both legs. He lives in London, where he now devotes to writing and drawing.