The difficulty of representing war in literature is notorious. Particularly vexing is the question of how to represent dead and wounded bodies resulting from war and other atrocities. Some critics call for a directly referential realism, while others find that such stark realism aestheticizes and depoliticizes the dead body. Despite the challenges, Iraqi novelists Betool Khedairi in Absent and Sinan Antoon in The Corpse Washer attempt to represent the disfigured space of Iraq in the wake of its disastrous series of wars. More specifically, both novelists attempt to recuperate for history the anonymous wounded and dead bodies of Iraqis—both soldiers and civilians, male and female. Rather than focusing on soldiers and combat, however, both writers choose instead the figure of the failed civilian artist to monumentalize and remember the destroyed bodies of Iraq. At first glance, the focus on civilian artists by Khedairi and Antoon may seem to be an evasion of the trauma of war. I argue, however, that a focus on visual art in their fiction allows these writers to engage in the debates over the representation of war and promote their own aesthetic theories. Antoon highlights his aesthetics of war by explicitly foregrounding the work of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, whom the protagonist Jawad reveres. Giacometti was known for his lifelong attempt to render his inner vision, which simultaneously captures the objective reality of the external world while also expressing the inner perspective and unique point of view of artist. In The Corpse Washer, Antoon attempts to replicate Giacometti’s aesthetics. In this novel, the external nightmare of Iraq and the internal nightmares of Jawad interpenetrate each other to such an extent that the boundary between the two realms becomes unclear to the reader. Khedairi, on the other hand, promotes the aesthetic modes of cubism and surrealism to represent the disfigured female body and the social distortions caused by wars. Despite their slightly different aesthetics, both Betool Khedairi and Sinan Antoon borrow from the traditions of visual art in order to evoke the distortions of history and the disfigured body politic of Iraq.