“The shah comes with tanks and armies of horses and men. Keep a careful lookout for them. They will be of a frightening size, but do not scare, run to give us warning and all will be well. This is our land and the gods of it are on our side.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (SEP 20, 2009)

A young Kurdish boy, living in the Zagros Mountains in 1921, has always felt loved and protected, despite his family’s “poverty.” He enjoys “flying” from the roof of the family’s hut, experiencing the soaring feelings of earth and heaven at the same time, and identifying with the falcons. “With his chest opened upward, he pushes his face deeper into the beam of sun and wishes for his thin bones and narrow shoulders to aspire among the chaotic open-aired thrash of wings, to fly high and above the hemmed land and sweep aloft the delineations marked out of him, on him, into him” as a Kurd. In gorgeous and poetic language, author Laleh Khadivi, recreates the “gloried ground” to which the boy is connected by birth and culture.

When, at age seven, he is suddenly taken by the men of his village on a journey to a cave, where he is initiated into manhood, he sees his simple life anew: “Boy once, now man, now Kurd, now Kurdish man, to reign over Kurdish land; the young suzerain, kingly after a simple cut.” His devoted mother, a victim of violence which killed her entire family when she was only five, considers him doomed to relive the horrors of warfare. Soon after his initiation, he accompanies the village men to a mountain lookout, where they wait for the shah’s troops to arrive. Determined to protect land which has been theirs for thousands of years, the men believe “We are the children of Mount Cudi, where Noah’s ark rested after the flood, and our families are born of the animals and gardens of the survived, of God’s chosen.”

Armed as they are with sabers, knives, and some rusty guns which they do not know how to use effectively, the Kurdish tribesmen, though fierce, are unprepared for the kind of military machine they face. The army’s arrival leads to a massacre, and the boy is orphaned, leaving the battlefield with the army, without a backward glance. Though in his first days as a conscript “the mind of the boy turned to madness,” he is ultimately consoled by the fact that he will be getting boots, a whole new “family,” and a new way of life.

Throughout the novel Laleh Khadivi, a highly accomplished writer, alternates points of view among the various characters, and, in the beginning of the novel, she even personifies nature—a tree, a falcon—in passages of great lyricism. With their echoing refrains and musical repetitions, some of these sections sound like psalms, a striking contrast to the brutality, bloodshed, and horrific rapes which follow.

Named Reza, for the shah, and Khourdi for his heritage, the boy grows up as a conscript soldier, becoming a favorite of the captain for his hard work, though he is often scorned by the city boys for his Kurdish background and the fact that he is singled out for praise. Though he usually behaves as the unthinking automaton he has been trained to be, he occasionally has moments in which his past overwhelms his present. Sent at fifteen to a Kurdish village, he recognizes, instinctively, the patterns of the fields, the animal pens, and especially the scent of burning sage, and as the army tries to capture two Kurdish commanders, they engage in terrifying brutality. Reza, to prove that he is one of the shah’s men, rather than a “dirty Kurd,” engages in some of the most brutal acts of all.

As the action moves from the 1930s and into the period of 1940 – the 1970s, Khadivi shows Reza Khourdi continuing to be the perfect soldier, marrying, and representing the wishes of the shah, but still suffering the inner conflicts of a brainwashed orphan. Khadivi’s portrait of this man is intimate and carefully drawn, and she creates great empathy for him in his plight, despite his actions. His assignment to Kermanshah, a Kurdish city, in 1940, and his long residence there, bring his personal conflicts to a head.

Much as been said on other sites about the brutality and violence in this book, especially in the treatment of women—and there is violence–but it is not overwhelming, and it is certainly not gratuitous. (Nor, for that matter, is it any worse than what finds on the evening news.) The novel is primarily a story of character, not plot, and any inhumanity is integrated as part of the author’s thematic progression as “Reza” moves from an innocent childhood, through his attempts to find “family” within the killing machine of the army, his attempts to find love (though his only memory of it is through his mother), and his final assessment of his own life. Reza’s character is well drawn and complete, despite his personal limitations.

I cannot speak to the accuracy of the picture Khadivi gives of Kurdish life or her use of non-Kurdish terminology (which one Amazon reader noted), but as an analysis of a person who represents many of the conflicts we read about in the present day—specifically, the conflicts between Iran and the Kurds and between Turkey and the Kurds—the novel is enlightening and absorbing. Khadivi also includes broader themes, touching on the use of boy soldiers (no matter what part of the world is involved), the brainwashing that takes place, and the reasons these boy soldiers are sometimes more brutal than their elders. She is a serious writer dealing with serious issues, and though her novel is not easy reading for people who live safe and comfortable lives, she opens such a world to examination and analysis.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (March 3, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	The Age of Orphans
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Laleh Khadivi
EXTRAS:	BookSlut review of The Age of Orphans Whiting Award winner
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More: Snow by Orhan Pamuk In the Walled Gardens by Anahia Friouz The Weight of All Things by Sandra Benitez

Bibliography:

• The Age of Orphans (March 2009)
• The Walking

” ‘Whence springs love?’ asks Ibn Arabi.

” ‘I love what fills me with light and increases the darkness deep within me,’ answers Rene Char.

“Between the question and the intimation of a reply, I moved ever closer to the Thinker, becoming more aware of the dangerous game that was defining itself in the space between us.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Kirstin Merrihew (AUG 8, 2009)

The nameless seductress of The Proof of the Honey declares, “In my life I have been addicted to beds and stories.” She has studied the classical Arabic erotica of al-Suyuti and al-Nafzawi, as well the Kama Sutra and Western works by Casanova, Henry Miller, and Georges Bataille. She also makes wild and saucy claims of having taken numerous lovers of both genders. These then form the bases of her addictions and a discernable core to her wandering writings about sex in the Near East.

Readers will find themselves trying to “swim” in a sea of contradictions and illusions under the pen of this intentionally unreliable narrator. Pushing us to frequently re-orient ourselves and reevaluate her provocative pronouncements reinforces the mysteries of sex and the vagaries of cultural pressures concerning its expression.

Her eleven chapters are “gates” she leads us through in latter-day Scheherazade style. Instead of a thousand stories, she boasts as many sexual partners. She tells us tales of an ancient mercury bed (to assist physical union) and the legalities of the temporary Shiite “marriage of pleasure”. She quotes Arab songs, verses, and folk wisdom (” ‘There are two kinds of women — lettuce women and women of embers’ “). In free-love fashion she declares, “Some people conjure spirits. I conjure bodies. I have no knowledge of my soul or the soul of others. I know only my body and theirs.” And one body she repeatedly encounters as she passes through her gates is that of the Thinker, the man whose sexual prowess caused her public and secret lives to converge. However, the Thinker is an illusive entity, a concoction actually, on whom this woman desires to hang her feelings and her thoughts on sex in the Arab world at large…and her in own private, swirling enclosure of passionate creation. She contemplates, “I read what I have written and it occurs to me that I have made the Thinker into an allegory….I said, ‘Be,’ and he was.”

Syrian Salwa Al Neimi’s novel (more correctly, novella) reportedly raised a sensation when it was published in Arabic. One can assume in Islamic culture it is a very daring volume. One example: it’s “Ninth Gate: Linguistics” dwells on a very crass word for intercourse. The narrator’s Arabic spell check program won’t acknowledge the word, proving, she says, that it is “programmed for dissimulation.” It has “castrated the language….castrated the computer….castrated me” she rants. Whether true freedom is dependent on the ability to spew the f-word at will is highly debatable, but it illustrates well that The Proof of the Honey intends to foment controversy in Arab society. It desires to poke the stick at the wasps’ nest in a part of the world that remains relatively insular and circumspect about sexual matters.

When a scholar named Sohar says she has heard the narrator intends to write about ” ‘love as seen by the Arabs,’ ” she (Sohar) is confused because there are already ” ‘ lots of books on the subject.’ ” The narrator interrupts with “deliberate rudeness” and corrects her: ” ‘I am writing about sex as seen by the Arabs.’ ” Sex. Not love. Again, she is about the body, about erotic literature, about framing a combustible thesis and goading its debate. The Proof of the Honey‘s author, through her narrator, propounds an extreme feminist view — with curious spears of male chauvinism protruding in some passages. Using this short volume as a barometer, the sexual revolution that shook the Western world in the 1960’s and ’70’s may be, for good or not, edging further into Muslim social consciousness now.

The sensual cover art of The Proof of the Honey suggests a novella of refined eroticism and lyricism. One cannot, upon finishing the book, be entirely satisfied, however, because:

1) The slight plot about an expat in Paris (the author, by the way, has herself lived in Paris since the 1970’s) one also readying a research paper on “ancient Arab books on sex” for a scheduled conference in the U.S. is thin veneer; it is a platform for the author’s mini essays.

2) The author’s/narrator’s thoughts are often confused and partial.

3) Although “sexual honey” and seductive lower backs are embedded (pun intended) in certain passages, for the most part, one needn’t fan oneself from embarrassment. Much original English-language erotic literature is arguably far more developed and arousing than this translation.

Despite its shortcomings as fiction, The Proof of the Honey is a unique and enticing historical and contemporary insight into Arab perspectives on sex…and this book may play a part in causing those existing perspectives to shift.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (April 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Publisher’s page on Salwa Al Neimi
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books of interest: Censoring An Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour The Isle of Dogs by Daniel Davies The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle

Bibliography:

• The Proof of the Honey (April 2009)

“You need to let go of the past, and focus on the future,” Mrs Naderi says. She hugs me again, and whispers, “I know you’re strong enough to move on. Leave this country as your promised Zari you would. You need to go to the States and get a college education, because only educated people can save this country. While there, tell every American what their government’s senseless support of a dictator has done to Iranian mothers. Tell them there will be no end to these atrocities until they stop paying for our oil with the blood of our children. Promise me that you will do your part toward emancipating our people, because you owe it to Doctor and Zari.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Jana L. Perskie (JUL 17, 2009)

Rooftops of Tehran is both a bittersweet coming of age tale as well as a story of the tragic loss of innocence.

The setting is Tehran in 1973 and 1974, a period when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a brutal dictator, ruled his country with an iron fist with the help of the United States. Members of his National Intelligence and Security Organization, the dreaded SAVAK, were seemingly everywhere. Mohammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, from 1951 to 1953, was famous for his passionate opposition to foreign intervention in his country. He was removed from power by a coup d’etat funded by the British and U.S. governments. The Shah, who had gone into exile during this period, returned to Iran, triumphant, and resumed total power once more.

Pasha Shaheed, our seventeen year-old protagonist, is too busy getting on with his young life and the process of growing up to be concerned with matters that do not involve him, his family and his friends directly. Pasha and his best friend, Ahmed, just completed eleventh grade and will return to high school in the fall as seniors. They are already making plans for college. Pasha’s father desperately wants his son to study civil engineering in the United States so he can return to Iran and build bridges. Pasha wants to study film making. Typical!

The two best friends spend the spring and summer months sleeping on the rooftops, as do most Iranians, in order to escape the heat. They talk, with intensity, about life in general – “There are no walls around what we say, or fears shaping what we think.” There is much humor in their discussions also, and in their schoolboy pranks and antics. Most of all, they talk about the young women they are in love with. Pasha and Ahmed are from Iran’s burgeoning middle class, and live during a period, before the 1979 revolution, when it was OK for unmarried boys and girls to have friendships, even to fall in love and demonstrate modest affection for one another, although this still remains taboo amongst the poor and the more religious people.

Ahmed loves Faheemeh in silence. Everyday he bikes ten minutes to her neighborhood, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. He makes friends with her two overly protective brothers to become closer to her, and dreams and schemes about a way to meet her. His father has told him that “Persians believe in silent communication; a look or a gesture imparts far more than a book full of words.”

Meanwhile, Pasha loves Zari, a neighborhood girl who is a close friend of his, but who has been betrothed, since birth, to Pasha’s dear friend and mentor, Ramin Sobhi, a political science major at the University of Tehran. Everyone calls Ramin “The Doctor.” The teenage boy feels torn. He idolizes “The “Doctor,” but is desperately in love with, and desires, the girl his friend is to marry. Guilt abounds.

Eventually, Pasha, Ahmed, Faheemeh, and Zari become close friends.They share their most personal experiences with one another. All four are very aware of the undercurrents of feelings which pass between them. They attempt to delicately balance friendship and love.

“The Doctor” is very political, and hates the repressive mullahs as much as he hates the Shah’s regime. He is extremely intelligent, yet, he is a humble young man. One day, he tells Pasha that he, Pasha, has “That.” “That” is a “priceless quality that is impossible to define, really…but you recognize it in the actions of great people.” He begins to educate Pasha about the lack of democracy in Iran. He tells him of the jails where innocent people are held, sometimes forever, with no trial, formal accusations or evidence. Many are horribly tortured. Others simply disappear.

One day, “The Doctor” tells Pasha that he will be away for a while. He is going to an area near the Caspian Sea with a group of college friends to teach literacy, a service the government frowns upon. He plans to marry Zari when he returns. But he never returns. He is abducted and killed by members of SAVAK. The effects of this tragedy on Zari and Pasha are extremely traumatic, and breed actions which lead to further tragedy.

Mahbod Seraji’s characters come to life on the page. The main characters’ extended families – loving, boisterous and eccentric – bring much humor and some sorrow to the well written narrative.

My one problem with the novel is also a strong point of the novel. The qualities shared by the book’s characters are universal qualities. This story could be about people anywhere, especially in countries where there are repressive governments. It is not difficult to identify with Pasha, his friends and family. They are like us. And we hear and read about such horror in the world today that we have become inured, in a sense, to the unspeakable. The situation in Iran under the Shah is really no worse than life in that country today – or in many other countries.

I did not get a real feel for the fascinating Iranian culture or the Iranian people. I lived in Iran in the late 1960s. My husband worked for an NGO, (nongovernmental organization), and I taught English as a second language. (ESL). In the three years we lived in that remarkable country, I was and am awed by the rich culture and the kindness and hospitality of the people. I wish the author could have incorporated more of the “differences” between the West and Iran, instead of accentuating the sameness.

Otherwise, I really did enjoy the novel and highly recommend it. Mahbod Seraji is a very talented author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 49 readers
PUBLISHER:	NAL Trade (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AMAZON PAGE:	Rooftops of Tehran
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mahbod Seraji
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide (with link) and Excerpt (with link)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of more Iranian novels: Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour The Quince Seed Potion by Morteza Baharloo Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai In the Walled Garden by Anahita Firouz And a great love story: Beneath a Marble Sky by John Shors

Bibliography:

• Rooftops of Tehran (May 2009)

“We Iranians take great pride in the empires we have built. If you read our extraordinary history, our country has been occupied time and again…and then, with diplomacy, intelligence, cunning, and patience, we have introduced our invaders…to our culture and, as the saying goes, we have made human beings out of them. The problem with us Iranians, however, is that because we have all these past glories, it is no longer very important for us to make a name for ourselves and to be of benefit to the world today. It seems we don’t care at all how the world will judge our current circumstances.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (JUN 18, 2009)

When I picked up this book, written by a popular Iranian author, my only expectation was that it would be an interesting view of life in Iran today, and, in particular, the life of a writer trying to avoid the “thought police.” What I never expected is that the book is so funny! Witty, cleverly constructed, satiric, and full of the absurdities that always underlie great satire, Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a unique metafiction that draws in the reader, sits him down in the company of an immensely talented and very charming author, and completely enthralls him.

The author, having reached the “threshold of fifty,” tells us at the outset that he intends to write a love story, one that is “a gateway to light. A story that, although it does not have a happy ending like romantic Hollywood movies, still has an ending that will not make my reader afraid of falling in love. And, of course, a story that cannot be political.” Most importantly, he says, “I want to publish my love story in my homeland.”

The author then becomes the narrator of two stories—a fictional love story, which appears here in boldface, and a metafictional commentary by the author of the love story, in regular type. Experimenting with what to include in his love story, what direction to take, and what he hopes to get away with when his story is read, the narrator, named, not surprisingly, “Shariar Mandanipour,” writes for the censor, ironically named Porfiry Petrovich, the police investigator of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He thinks that “because I am an experienced writer, I may be able to write my story in such a way that it survives the blade of censorship.”

But the author is also true to his reader. Whenever he believes that Petrovich will reject something, he either crosses it out himself (leaving it visible so that the reader can read, literally, between the lines), or he changes direction and rewrites the action of the story, while explaining why Petrovich might object. He never rants or gets angry, preferring instead to show the excisions as silly—after all, his goal is to get his book published in his own country. He also understands that an Iranian audience has far different cultural expectations from a global audience, and he respects those differences.

The love story that evolves is the story of Sara, a college student, and Dara, a former student, who was jailed and kept in solitary confinement for two years for renting and selling banned videotapes of films by Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Ingemar Bergman. Dara is now lucky to have found a job as a house painter. He has worshipped Sara from afar for a year, having seen her briefly at a student demonstration, and he leaves her coded messages hidden in library books. She never sees him, however, since men and women remain in separate sections of the library; he sees only her shoes from beneath the card catalog. Connecting Sara and Dara’s present romantic predicament with the nation’s long cultural history, the author tells of an Iranian poet named Nizami, who, nine hundred years ago, created a romantic poem about Shirin, an Armenian princess, and Khosrow, one of the greatest kings of Persia. Their difficulties in meeting and fulfilling their romance echoes throughout the novel and offers parallels to the story of Sara and Dara.

Gradually, the two young people begin to have “whispering computer chats,” and eventually meet secretly, including once in a cemetery and once in the emergency room of a hospital, avoiding situations in which anyone from the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance will see them, since the meeting of a young man and woman who are not related is prohibited. Though they fall deeply in love, Sara is also being courted by Sinbad, a very wealthy older man, and her family knows that if she marries him, they will all be better off, financially. They do not know about Dara, or about Sara’s feelings for him.

As the story progresses, Shariar Mandanipour comments about censorship in his own life. Prevented from naming his two children the names he wanted because they were not approved names, he responded by naming his daughter “Roja,” meaning “Red Star,” a Communist symbol, and his son “Daniel,” a Jewish name. (Ironically, these names were approved.) In a hilarious episode, he talks about the “vile and filthy scenes,” that were censored from his own books, explaining to his publisher after one meeting with a censor that “Mr. Petrovich forgave us three breasts and two thighs.” Though the Iranian Constitution allows free speech, it does not say that books and publications can “freely leave the print shop.” Hence, many books get printed and then never released, unable to get the required permit. Major film masterpieces are banned or censored, and headscarves unexpectedly appear in traditional stories for six-year-olds.

Throughout the novel, the author maintains an easy-going, conversational style and a self-deprecating, wry sense of humor. His characters become real people to him—and to the reader, who wonders constantly whether Sara and Dara will be able to escape the censor with their story. A dead midget hunchback becomes an ominous, repeating symbol, and when Dara is followed and is in danger of being assaulted by dark forces, the reader cares. Mandanipour has created a “novel” so rich with ideas, cultural history, and literary references–to writers such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, Kafka, and Malraux–that anyone interested in the creative process will be fascinated by his thinking as he creates a love story within the parameters of the present climate in Iran, which is, of course, the “real” story here.

(Translated to English by Sara Khalili)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; First Edition, First Printing edition (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	Censoring an Iranian Love Story
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Shahriar Mandanipour
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	If you like this, try these: The Cyclist by Viken Berberian Or more on Iran: Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz

Bibliography:

• Censoring an Iranian Love Story (May 2009)