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Two Blankets, Three Sheets by Rodaan Al Galidi – nine years in an asylum centre

When I lived in the Netherlands, long-settled Iranians joked about the native Dutch: “If they invite five people for dinner, they’ll make exactly five potatoes.” Newer arrivals would gasp at this, since in the Middle East hospitality is a matter of pride and any decent person cooks a feast no matter how many are expected. “What if someone wants a second potato?” they’d say, “Oh God, what if guests leave … still hungry?” “I wouldn’t worry about that,” the settled Iranians would reply. “They’ll never invite you over.” It was a sad kind of joke, an understanding about the nature of welcome in the Netherlands.

I’ve never read a book that better illustrates the human cost of the European asylum systems

Rodaan Al Galidi’s Two Blankets, Three Sheets is a funny, maddening, sometimes absurd reckoning with the pettiness of the Dutch immigration system as seen by Samir, an Iraqi refugee who is stuck in an asylum centre for nine years. The novel, already a bestseller in the Netherlands, is openly autobiographical and, to be fair, the Dutch are just a stand-in for all entitled westerners and bureaucrats.

As soon as Samir lands at Schiphol airport in 1998, he shreds and flushes away every scrap of paper, including his fake passport. Any identifying detail will make it easier for the Dutch to send him back to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He knows this, but little else. In the custody of the Dutch, he assumes he’s close to asylum, freedom and life. In fact, years of indignities lie ahead, starting with rubber gloves and an order to fish the pieces of his passport out of the toilet.

Like many refugees, in his first interview Samir says too much, trusts too much, submits too much. He doesn’t claim his rights (to refuse an interview if he’s sick, to speak to a pro bono lawyer first, to remain silent in the presence of an incompetent translator), and yet he’s forced to sign a paper confirming that he understands them. Under pressure, he damns himself. Then, whenever he tries to report cruelty by an officer, or a mistake by a translator, he is called a liar. In an almost satirical exchange, his interviewer says she cannot accept the official birthday he was given in Iraq, so it’s better that he should have none at all. And yet, the biggest indignity is the waiting – the fact that the government sees no value in his wasted years. In the dreary asylum centre he is considered housed and safe. But for its sleepless residents, the centre is more brutal on the soul than their war-torn homelands. In Iraq, Samir knew no one who even considered suicide. In his time at the asylum centre, eight escaped by it.

He is issued two blankets, three sheets, a towel, a pillow and a pillowcase, and forced to keep track of them (a detail the author never allows us to forget). Each day Samir queues to sign in at the centre’s reception, to prove he hasn’t escaped, while the administrators chat, ignoring the growing line of refugees and drawing out their humiliation. Those who speak out of turn are forced to stand in a corner until told to move. “Now, all these years later,” writes Samir, “I still stand waiting in the hallway.”

For Samir, the Dutch instinct for meagerness, blind logic and pitiless accountability isn’t about dinner party potatoes – after all, like my Iranian friends, he is “never once invited to a Dutch person’s home”. Dutch logic implies that its own systems and people function flawlessly while destitute foreigners are born liars; money buys some of them credibility via a lawyer, but the rest are con artists. Before long, Samir loses hope. “Civil servants are empowered to vent their aggression in a variety of ways. Power of the keyboard, power of the mouth, power of the hands. When a Dutch civil servant loses his patience, he can turn a person’s life into a living hell.” The stories in Two Blankets, Three Sheets are heartbreaking, exhausting and infuriating. We learn about Samir’s earlier travels through Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, where he is conscripted as a smuggler and a movie extra (in another charming bit of satire, he’s repeatedly shot, strung-up and tortured on a Vietnam war set, while the screenwriter pumps him for details from Iraq). In the asylum centre, he shares a roof with a murderous Saddam Hussein general, a Russian beauty, a kind seamstress whose sewing machine is confiscated, a forgotten man driven to madness by 16 years awaiting an asylum letter that never comes, and a baby who becomes a growing embodiment of Samir’s wasted years.

Throughout all this, Samir keeps his humour. “Where’s the third sheet?” a stockroom worker asks. “I ate it,” he says. This book is full of strange details, the trifles that accumulate in the memory. The man with a bin bag full of documents; the refugees eating all the waterfowl from the local pond. It infuses tedious sufferings with drama, humour and life: the agony of waiting, the cruelty and pettiness of bureaucracy. It makes visceral the shameful ways we misuse our small powers over each other.

In his foreword Al Galidi, now a Dutch citizen, reminds us that the book is fiction “for the reader who cannot believe it. But for anyone open to it, it is non-fiction.” Here, and throughout, he is trying to make the settled reader understand the precarious nature of truth for the refugee storyteller. Credibility is awarded to the whitest, the richest, the ones with the best English. Single men who have made mistakes at the border are doomed to languish, unbelieved, for years. I am also a refugee and I know that often fiction is a better conduit of truth than non-fiction – one can craft details, disguise and combine characters, make a decade seem suspenseful, weed out irrelevancies. Fiction readers are primed to believe; they’ve come for a story, not a lesson in law or politics.

Al Galidi makes little use of the artistic tools available to a novelist. He is close to the story and recounts it like unedited non-fiction – one event after another, rather than rising and falling tensions; strings of underused characters; a deus ex machina bringing the novel to a halt. Sometimes he engages in fantastical dialogue – making his hero too brave, too bold. One can see the refugee’s fantasy of what he might have said. In this way, Al Galidi’s life fails to transform fully into a novel in the same way a refugee might never weave a story powerful enough to move a cynical Dutch interviewer.

Related: The ungrateful refugee: ‘We have no debt to repay’

The prose (or maybe just the translation) is often clunky: cliches and heavy-handed images abound. Many of the jokes fall flat or are ruined by over-explanation. Al Galidi doesn’t stop at “I felt like a wild animal” (already too much), but adds, “An animal that once had a free spirit, a wild heart, but that now only does what the tamer’s whip tells him to do.” Often he stops to address the audience, to explain unnecessarily (for instance, that he’s altered a name) in the way an interview subject might. He is lost in the space between fiction and non-fiction, apologising for every invention.

And yet I’ve never read a book that better illustrates the human cost of the European asylum systems – their many flaws and deceptions, the bad faith with which small inconsistencies are used to return people to danger, the way the sympathies of a single, jaded interviewer can make or ruin a life, how a translation error carelessly entered into a file can stand as the damning proof of a lie for ever. This vital, eye-opening work is essential to our collective education, as a history, as a call to action, bringing one person’s suffering vividly to life in the imagination of strangers. And in the end that, as much as crafted stories and artful prose, gives literature its enduring power.

• Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee is published by Canongate. Two Blankets, Three Sheets by Rodaan Al Galidi, translated by Jonathan Reeder, is published by World Editions (RRP £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.