Customer Reviews

At the Wall of the Almighty (Emerging Voices)

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Beautiful and horrible, as haunting as it is disturbing, Farnoosh Moshiri's At the Wall of the Almighty takes us through a prison in a land where religion has become law. The political prisoner narrates us through a chilling rapport with Looney Kamal, his guard and torturer. At the same time he is sifting through memories of family, passion and capture in a desperate attempt to remember and cling to who and what he is. Moshiri's poetical prose weaves memories and characters together, unravels the threads, then draws them together again with unsettling shrewdness.

Farnoosh Moshiri has done a superb job in imparting the inhuman ambience of an institutionally sanctioned abyss. This abyss is a political prison. The writer so masterfully imparts the latent human capacity for both heroism and sheer cruelty. This abyss is not intended merely for incarceration. The sponsors wish to destroy the human capacity for truth and justice. Their mission: the breaking of the human spirit. They fail miserably. Moshiri's "unbreakables" win at the end. Their bodies shrink from the pain of torture but their souls shine blinding us the shamed spectators. The episodes narrated in this book defy objectivity since they seem so incredible. Grim and unthinkable realities must be conveyed with skillful subtlety and simplicity as we the mortal onlookers may be faint at heart. We need great fiction. We need to be reminded in a coaxing way that cannibalism still exists all over the world albeit in disguised forms. The implied setting is coincidental. I congratulate the writer and recommend this book to anyone who cares about human rights.

At first, the book is almost difficult to read because the tale of "the unbreakable one" being in prison is so bleak and depressing but as he descends further into this physical hell the author also takes us into the mind of this nameless character who descends into his own world of memories in order to survive. It's this dichotomy of the horror of prison and the beauty that still survives in his mind that captivates the reader and draws us into the story. It's a wonderful tribute to the power of imagination and to the strength of independent thought in the face of fanacticism. The last few chapters are especially moving and rewarding. After I closed the book I found myself sitting silently for a while in quiet awe of the author's masterful ability to take me on such a satisfying journey.

Reading this book makes you realize that Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz did not have a clue when he whispered, "The horror! The horror!"

This work easily eclipses Puig's "Kiss of the Spider Woman," Bharadwaj's "Closet Land," and Kafka's "The Trial," and "Metamorphosis."

The incredible interplay between the ever changing, metamorphosing "good" and "evil" characters, the horrifying themes, the nightmarish and disturbing images, the heroic struggle to overcome, to make sense, to drive meaning out of misery ... This book will leave you awe struck.

Wagner would have been proud to have collaborated with this modern-day, existential, Persian Shahrazad to compose an opera based on her work.

Write more, Ms. Moshiri. Please write more.

Mahler once said:"A Symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything." His symphonies take you deep into the world of his imagination specially his childhood memories. But they always bring the listener back to the tragic real world. Moshiri's novel is a Mahler symphony in words not in notes. Her anonymous hero takes you to faraway places in his imagination and childhood memories, but brings you back to the Orwellian real world of a 21st century Inquisition.

Read "At The Wall of the Almighty" and know what it feels like to be enmeshed in a Persian fabric. As the narrator takes you through his universe of memories of childhood and youth, you will think of the universe inside yourself. Like the colors set in Persian tapestry, your imagination will resonate as the nameless narrator, the unbreakable one, relates the fantasies, memories and dreams of his past in the pages of the novel.

Read "At The Wall of the Almighty" and follow the narrator through the mental, emotional, and physical anguish of a political prisoner who is defiant, yet completely subject to the merciless, inhuman power of religious fundamentalists who have taken secular power and use it to crush any independence of body, mind or spirit.

Beyond the local circumstances depicted in the novel, you will find universal themes: love, family, friendship, childhood, coming-of-age, the individual and society, freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, the desire for happiness. Moshiri's novel takes you through the sensual, emotional and spiritual moments of contemporary human experience masterfully and unforgettably.

This is perhaps one of the most brutal, horrifying books about a country's inner turmoil that I have ever read, but don't be put off by that...it is also a singularly brilliant testament of man's inhumanity to man, a masterpiece. As our nameless narrator moves through the prison toward the eventual cell of the Unbreakables (the point of no return), his memories--lost to him at the onset of the novel--slowly come back, and as the walls get darker, so too does the story of his life. Moshiri deftly captures the terrifying feelings that accompany torture, and the remnants of hope that sustain the bleak lives of those trapped in Hall 20, cell 4. I kept trying to guess the ending of this book as I read, but it was impossible, and yet it ends exactly as it should, and that's the beauty of this work.

At the Wall of the Almighty is a powerful story of the victim of oppressive rule, both that of the Shah and of the Ayatollahs in Iran. The grimness of the central story of a political prisoner is relieved by the flashbacks and memories of a variety of scenes, some warm, some comic, some in a kind of hallucinatory magical realism. Memorable characters abound, and even one of the villians, a prison guard, is humanized and shown to be a victim of the ideology he has bought into.

At the Wall of the Almighty shows what it would feel like to be cast into the worst level of hell. The nameless narrator is pulled through the labyrinth of a fanatical prison with his imagination as his only salvation. With his longing for home and his lost twin, he is a loveable hero, and we long for his escape. What makes the book bearable is his dignity and innocence in the face of such raw brutality. His spirit never breaks.

How many people read "serious literature?" How manay people read "big serious novels?" Not many. How many people have access to serious literature published by smaller publishers? The number is even less. I found "At the Wall of the Almighty" in a discount bookstore and since the Middle Eastern affairs are hot, I picked it up. The more I read the more I found myself in a world that Kafka, Conrad, Joyce, Beckett, and other great similar writers have created. The freshness of narrative, the imagery, the many stories within stories, magical realism, surrealism, pure realism, drama within fiction, dream and illusion ... all and all are masterly crafted to tell the story of a prisoner who has forgotten his name as the result of the tortures of Islamic Fundamentalist jailors. Read this book and after finding your way out of the labyrinths of Moshiri's novel (if you ever find your way out!) you will realize that you have changed. This is what great art does and I regret that a major publisher is not paying attention to this contemporary masterpiece. The time is now ripe to introduce Moshiri's book to the world.