Customer Reviews

The Bathhouse

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3 star:		(1)
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Once in a while a book comes along that you start to read and you can't put down until you finish reading it. This is one such book. The naive school girl who is taken to a horrible political prison starts out as any young, innocent and naive teenager who is not interested or involved in politics. But once there, she witnesses and experiences what is happening to political prisoners, in this case women prisoners, behind the prison walls all in the name of God and all because they do not agree with the ideology of the ruling class. This is not a story limited to a country or conflict. It is a universal story that can happen, has happened and is happening in many countries. But, Farnoosh Moshiri somehow takes us along with her young protagonist through the events of this book so that it is as if we are experiencing them with her. The writing is powerful yet natural and flowing and you just can't stop reading until the end. And, when you close the book, it is as if you have matured along side the protagonist, all in the short span of a month for her and just hours for you, but the lessons will stay with you for a lifetime. I recommend this book to everyone, especially to young women.

What a fantastic book. Very insightful and informative. What one should take away from this book as well as Mrs. Moshiri's other novel "At The Wall of The Almighty" is how introspective Iranians are about their lives before and after the revolution. I believe that through these books, people in the west can come to a better understanding of this society and culture. We hear so much about war, terrorism, and the development of weapons programs that we overlook that the Iranians have a rich and beautiful culture and so much to offer us in the form of literature.

When a teenage girl is arrested by Iranian authorities, it's more like an accidental abduction. Her brother dabbles in politics forbidden by the fundamentalist ruling regime, but the girl is innocent.

Only there is no innocence in The Bathhouse. If you have been apprehended, you must have committed a crime. If you have committed a crime, you must be punished. The girl finds herself in a living hell, where torture is an art form. She - and all those around her - suffers in an accelerating cycle of pain and humiliation limited only by the imagination of her captors. And yet the girl finds, and creates, sparks of humanity in this most ihhuman setting.

The Bathhouse might be an attempt to measure the depths of institutionalized evil. In spite of being forced to contemplate so much unrestrained cruelty and violence, I could not make myself look away. And I could not put this book down until I finished it.

Powerful, disturbing and brilliant, the Bathhouse is a harrowing account of an innocent 17-year-old girl thrown into an Iranian prison. Told in first person, the story brings you inside the cell walls and never flinches from the mental and physical torture that happens there. What makes this novel not only bearable but beautiful are the familial relationships the girl develops among the other women prisoners, including a doctor, a professor and her mother, a school girl and a madwoman. Farnoosh Moshiri is a master storyteller, and as a survivor of a holocaust in her homeland, she has so much to tell us, not only about the horror of a religious dictatorship but ultimately, about the triumph of the human soul.

Once you begin reading this fictional account of a young woman's ordeals under a fundamentalist regime, you, like I, will not be able to lay the book down until you finish it. It took me about four hours to read this lyrically gripping story. Moshiri takes you inside the thoughts and feelings of a young woman just blossoming into adult life, yet subject to the most abject debasement, inflicted in the name of a divinity too terrible for the real world---or is it?
The fundamentalist jailers and their victims, all women, are fictional, but the ordeals described are experiences of Iranian women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Approaching the barbarity of the Taliban, the womens' prison, a converted bathhouse, leaves an indelible mark on those who survive it.
The arbitrariness of fundamentalist regimes is accentuated by the situation of the 17 year-old protagonist, a young woman arrested by mistake but treated like a political prisoner nonetheless.
Moshiri's writing is direct, realistic and gripping in this novel, yet an aura develops that is hauntingly lyrical, as is the author's artwork, reproduced on the dust jacket of the novel.
Read this novel for its craft of writing, read it for its immediate relevancy to current events in the mideast, read it for its exploration of a woman's initiation into adulthood, but read it now!!!!

An absolutely beautiful book here. It's hard to say that I enjoyed reading it, as the subject matter is difficult, but the prose is well-written and draws you into the story. I've long been fascinated with the middle-east and love reading stories from all over. This is a great look into the impact the Iranian revolution had on some people. I'm learning about immigrants and refugees right now in one of my graduate classes, and this book, while fictional, gave a good look into conditions that might result in flight from a country.

Overall, I would heartily recommend this book to lovers of fiction and history.

The young protagonist is jailed without benefit of counsel and detained and tortured. It's good to know nothing like this could happen in the U.S. Seriously, though, The Bathhouse is compelling, and for days after reading it (in one day), I thought about the resilency of the human spirit.

Once you take this book in you hand you are not able to put it down. This is an incredible true story about the tranfiguration of an innocent naive middle class girl, mistakenly taken to a horrible prison for political prisoners, to a mature understanding woman who finds out what man is capable of harming his fellow men in the name of God. A must read for everyone.

While the premise of the story setup for a gripping tale, suprisingly little was revealed to the reader beyond the confines of the bathhouse. Nothing about the revolution, the government, the counter-revolutionaries. I also find it annoying the way the author enables her narrator to totally disassociate herself from the pains of the tortures she was going through. She would be eavesdropping to the serenade of the toads or musing over the beautiful stars while being punished at night. At most, she'd say that her face is numbed from the beating. The narrative is very straight forward, the story is mostly driven by its events. There were two glaring misspelling of the word "waste" as "waist". In conclusion, the book is definitly a page turner but the author failed to go beyond the intiguing setting of the story.