The Art of the Catalogue in the Fiction of War In his recent novels The Corpse Washer and The Book of Collateral Damage, Sinan Antoon tries to account, in original ways, for the extensive damage wars caused to his country. His two narratives reflect a unique writing of the disaster that challenges traditional accounts of the war novel. Relying on the techniques of the fragment, and using the art of narrative collage of well- knit segments, Antoon creates a poetic index fleshing out the minute losses inflected by war, from the human cost down to the places and myriad things that collectively form the traumatic memory of war. In both novels, the narratives draw on multiple sources and art/artists, rituals and writers’ experiences such as tradition (Shiite tradition of corpse washing), (sculpture: Jawad Kadhim; Giacometti, etc), and (history: al-Mutanabbi, al-Tawhidi, Benjamin, etc…) to bring to life the voices of all things lost and the dignity of all the victims. Focusing on the techniques of writing the fragment and the collage, this paper will show how Antoon relies heavily on the centrality of art (from poetry, to sculpture, to tradition) to create the archive and document the trauma.