Customer Reviews

The Blind Owl

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Readers have compared this classic modern Persian novel to the works of Poe's fevered imagination. Its hero is delusional, obsessed, and maybe totally mad. The narrative is dream-like in structure, which is to say layered, circular, and driven by its own demented logic.

If that's not enough, the far-from-reliable narrator has fiercely psychotic conflicts regarding women. The author may well be commenting on the deep divisions between men and women in his culture, where attraction is balanced against profound distrust. His narrator is either idealizing women or portraying them as evil incarnate.

Meanwhile, there are episodes of black comedy, one involving identical twin men locked in a room with a cobra. And the cycling and recycling of nightmarish images, each as if occurring for the first time, offers an ironic motif of déjà vu. Recommended to lovers of the surreal who enjoy puzzling over the meanings of dreams, whether personal or effusions of the collective unconscious.

i just finished reading the blind owl, and it IS one of the best books i've ever read. the first section is very dark and symbolic and contains a lot of repetitions - a picture within a picture within a picture. i rather wish the book had contained more chapters like this. it was too wonderful for words. the second section detailed the unraveling of the main character in his daily tangible life: his feverish confinement to his room, his growing anxiety, his sense of pervasive and impending doom, which extended beyond himself to the whole of mankind and nature. unfortunately, since my background on iran and ancient persia is somewhat wanting, i think i missed much of the historical symbolism that other readers have mentioned, and had swallowed it mostly as a psychological novel. i'm going to reread it and also look for some kind of a supplement. read this book!

An Persian friend reccommended this book to me, and managed to read it all in one sitting. It was such a quick, compelling read, with so much going on that you feel like you are running through a sandstorm. I have NEVER read a description of an insane mind as well written as this. Poe, Lovecraft, and Dostoeyevsky, I would say, have written excellent descriptions of insane minds, but this is by far the best. By the way, Lovecraft and Dostoyevsky are my two favorite authors.
The passage where the narrator describes his dream woman as an angel, and describes the beauty of her eyes is definatly the most beautiful passage I have ever read. Likewise, his descriptions of the more gruesome scenes are really quite disgusting.
Hedayat really wrote a masterpiece here. I would highly reccomend it to people who enjoy the authors I have previously mentioned. Its a great book, with so many layers, and so many different ways to interpret what's going on. In the end, even I was unable to figure out what the truth of the matter really was. Absolutely fascinating.

I can't relate at all to the reviewer who compared reading this book to pulling teeth. It is strange and slightly demented, but these qualities seem only to add to the overall quality. If one were to be in a peculiar state of mind and smoke opium, the result would be something like this. The protagonist is a sick, solitary misanthrope who suffers from what seem to be hallucinations of an old man with a turban with a horrifying laugh (this is repeated over and over again, like some kind of mantra) and a beautiful woman our anti-hero is fixated on. He persistently refers to his wife as "the bitch", but seems to love her dearly despite her infidelity and disdain of him. Hedayat's character is both self loathing and world loathing, preferring to his hypnagogic visions and sickly existence to 'real' life. He no longer makes distinctions between sanity and insanity. He finds a woman's body chopped up (it seems) and does not tell the police. By the end of this novel, really a series of incomprehensible happenings spliced with some bitter comments on humanity, we have come to understand him as a lucid but self divided man losing his mind. This is a must.

Authors who are translated from their native language into English often suffer for it. Sadegh Hedayat is not a writer that many in the West are familiar with and this book is certainly not for most readers. That out of the way, this is a masterpiece of literature.

The book focuses on the descent into madness of a young man who makes his income from painting pen cases. One day he sees the very image that he has painted for his career, out of a window that appears in his closet. There is no window in the closet. The story from there is deeply disturbing and highly original, focusing on love of the most extreme and paralyzing variety.

The Blind Owl is not a book that you are meant to immediately understand, it is rich with symbolism and surrealism. For people that cannot or do not want to go along for the wild ride this is not a good book. For those who can take a breath of the wild night-ride on the back of a cart to dig up a curiously familiar vase and contemplate whether or not they have been drinking poisoned wine - don't think - order now.

Review by Brian H. Appleton, www.zirzameen.com of:

The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

The story is like an opium dream in which the reader drifts along with the writer in and out of awake and dreaming with recurring themes and symbols like an intoxicated mind trying to keep hold of its tenuous grasp on reality. There is the blue morning glory flower, the flower-vase of Rhages, kisses with the bitter taste of the green stub end of the cucumber, the smell of champac perfume, the wine bottle with the cobra venom that he can't get rid of like a boomerang, the singing drunken policemen passing by the street below, the bone handled butcher knife that he can't get rid of like a boomerang, the butcher cutting up sheep carcasses, the coughing horses with dead sheep slung over their backs, these images keep recurring in different circumstances like a floating mirage. His imagery is at times stunningly beautiful like his simple description of a row of dark shadowy trees along a road in the night which look like they are all holding hands so as not to fall down on a slippery slope. The rows of strange and menacing looking houses of geometric shapes like cones and prisms that recur as in a dream sequence; if it were made into a film it would be reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal."

The hearse driver and the odds and ends man with his head scarf and hideous laughter "of a quality that make the hairs on one's body stand on end," and the narrator himself seem to at times be different people and at other times they are one and the same. In the end we don't know if the wife has committed adultery or not with one or with many or only with the old odds and ends man or if in fact that was really the narrator and that this is all his imagined paranoia. We sense that his frustration, love and hate for his wife is powerfully real and all consuming regardless of the state of her fidelity and in fact he claims that her neglect is what is causing his slow death.

The painting on the top of the pen case is of the dark mysterious woman with staring eyes on the other side of a stream holding a blue morning glory flower while the old man with the scarf wrapped around his head and neck squats on the other side laughing hideously. Where the story started to remind me of Edgar Allen Poe is the first time the theme of the drunken policemen singing as they pass by his window in the street makes him think they are coming to get him so we are given a hint that he has either already committed murder or will, even though the strange silent woman on the pen case has mysteriously appeared sitting on his doorsteps and when he lets her into his house, she goes straight to his bed and lays down and dies. We begin to understand that she and his wife are one and the same person but events which chronologically should precede others seem out of order like the way hallucinations induced by drugs seem to interrupt the brain waves like jumbling the letters of the alphabet out of order even if they are still all there. We have no idea in the end if the story took place over a matter of days or months or all in one night like the hauntings by the various ghosts of Christmas of Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."

The descriptions of his own thoughts and feelings and his changing body appearance and shadow and facial expressions, his fevers and depressions and the pleasure and power he takes from fear, pain and self torment, is like an ever changing kaleidoscope of one completely living within one's own mind and only marginally in touch with the outside world like the autistic. It is like a river passing along in which the same objects bob underwater only to resurface again and again further up or down the stream like his and his wife's lost childhood playing hide-and-seek along the Suran.

His descriptions of dried coagulated blood and decay and murder, dispassionately like a mortician performing autopsy without emotion or like it is not really happening but only imagined so that the reader is never actually sure, keeps us riveted from the beginning of the tale to the end.

Again it is reminiscent of Poe's poem "The Beautiful Annabel Lee" and his seemingly unorthodox marriage to his 13 year old cousin and her early demise in real life. The suspense rises and falls palpably like a recurring tide and makes one feel with the author, like a rat stuck on the tread mill of life, coming round full circle again and again but never really going anywhere with only the illusion of linear progress. The story ends as abruptly as it begins, yet resolves with everything falling neatly into place like the toys that come to life when no one is looking, which then freeze the moment a person enters the room. The ease with which the author has populated this dreamscape of existential nausea makes me think it was a struggle with which he was intimately familiar himself and his suicide becomes all the more poignant.

I read The Blind Owl 45 years ago while living in Berlin, Germany. I was blown away with the astounding literary images and the strange journey the writer so skillfully creates as he takes the reader through the dark corners and hidden shadows of his madness. To this day, it is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. I lost my copy years ago, and am ordering another copy. I'm anxious to see if it still has the same impact on me all these years later.

Celator

"There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker"
That is how the translation of D.P. Costello starts.
This first line of the book is enough to grab your undivided attention. This opening draws you into a surreal dream world where fiction and fact flow into each other seamlessly, where symbolism and real life events coexist with the shadows of the dreamworld and people of flesh and blood.
If you like, this book can be compared to a fugue, a musical discipline where one theme is repeated and transposed/transformed in the other voices. Likewise, certain themes are repeated in a different context, much like a puzzle. If you are looking for something easy to read, skip this book. BUT, if you are looking for a little gem in literature, which will reveal itself to you only after giving it your undivided attention, much like a beautiful woman waiting to be conquered, then buy this book. You will read it, and read it again and again, and experience a secret joy over discovering something this precious, a precious little gem.

I've just read this, The Blind Owl, published first in Farsi in 1937 by Sadiq Hidayat/Sadegh Hedayat - and found it hallucinatory, sinister, troubling and strange - compellingly so. The eeriness has oblique echoes of rightly famous Edgar Allen Poe's story, The Tell-tale Heart from The Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe's the Fall of the House of Usher, the Tell-tale Heart and Other Tales); Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (Dover Thrift) and Kafka's claustrophobic environments and strange experiences in The Castle (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) and in the city of Joseph K.'s The Trial (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature). It strikes me that the author has consciously accounted for these influences, though there may be many others from Persian literature, his own culture.

So how could you not be drawn in? After all, it is a story of madness, obsession and horrific murder, even - perhaps - necrophilia, of lying down with her in bed as her body decomposes. Sounds like a gross-out horror story, doesn't it? But I assure you it's not; it's much more sophisticated than that, albeit that it remains disturbing, as any tale of madness should be and certainly more haunting than shlock goreish horror fiction.

While the language of the English translation by D. P. Costello is simple, accessible - and poetic - yet you become aware that simplicity itself is part of a trap the author has set you, the reader... you, innocently, read on, uncertain of the future you are about to imbibe, and almost immediatley you are trapped, taken in, feeling helpless yet with eyes wide open, on a journey being carried inside the narrator's mind: he appears to be a straightforward, simple man, who makes his living as an artist creating designs on the lids of pen-cases (but the design is always the same image - 'in the grip of a mad obsession' (p.86), unconsciously referring to himself, the design of an 'a Cypress tree at the foot of which is squatting a bent old man bent like a fakir [...] and a woman 'holding a flower of morning glory in her hand. Between them runs a stream' (p.86)). This is one of many phrases he repeats throughout the telling of his tale.

By page 24, you are being told of murder, of the narrator severing his wife's head, then proceeding to amputate her limbs and the disposal of her body is grotesque and surreal. Or has done these things, really? Are they delusions? Either way, whether he's 'only' deranged and has fantasised his killing of his wife, or he actually has, you can't help but read on, 'look' at what is happening to him, in the same unhealthily curious way drivers/passers-by often look at a traffic accident, wanting, yet not wanting to, see the gory details, the blood and terror of it in stark reality. Yet we look. It is like that here; it is genuinely disturbing.

The narrator is or has experienced seems to be a complete nervous breakdown/break from reality, and you sense the world he describes is that of a socio/psychopath, though he never sees himself as such. He has no real sense of time, admitting that an event of a thousand years ago may seem to him more real than something that occurred yesterday. On top of which, he is addicted to opium - in ever-increasing daily doses, and consumes wine: he is absolutley conflicted - he wants - is compelled - to tell you his story, yet at the same time he tells you he smokes opium because he wants to forget; and that he's not even sure what really happened 'life is a fiction', he says', 'a story'. And here we are, smack in the heart of in the course of its telling. He doesn't seem to sleep, he hardly eats or if he's eating..he is becoming a shadow (p.3), just wasting away: 'A sensation which had long been familiar to me was this, that I was slowly decomposing while I yet lived'(p.59); he is alienated, an outsider, he despises others and has no value for his own life: 'For some reason all activity, all happiness onthe part of other people made me feel like vomiting. I was aware that my own life was finished and was slowly and painfully guttering out' (p.68); he has nightmares of beheadings, of butchering; his eye is drawn to the butcher's opposite when he works away with his knife into the flesh his dead animals just delivered to him.

Such a breakdown doesn't exclude his own sane insights into his self and circumstances and events, yet these are threaded through as a pattern in a cloth of a different colour overall (for example, just two pages into the story, while admitting his one 'fear is that tomorrow I may die without having come to know myself', he immediately goes on to say 'In the course of my life I have discovered that a fearful abyss lies between me and other people'); these and other such reflections are moments of genuine self-awareness/insight, but you know they're not the threads holding the entire cloth together anymore; his sanity is in that sense a sort of echo, one of many operating levels both psychological as well as in verbal/narrative telling of his story. So from the outset, in the very brief chapter one, which is in effect a prologue, he tells you he is trying to make sense of it all ...

You know for certain that he utterly loathes his wife, and he obsesses and returns time and again to key phrases and expressions, just like someone with a serious psychological fissure/crack in their worldview. Yet even his hatred for his wife - he only ever refers to her as 'the bitch' 'because no other name would suit her so well' (p.60) and he believes her to have had countless affairs; not even affairs, as such, but animalistic, sexual betrayals, sleeping with anyone she chooses. None the less his hatred appears to be based upon love and lust turned dark and sadistic and vengeful, as a consequence of his own feelings for her being unreciprocated (as we know, this perennial theme of revenge/murder occurs as much in life as it is reflected in fiction). He believes she never truly cared for him, even though it seems he loved her from when he was a child and they played happily together on the outskirts of their city, where they lived.

You're never quite sure what is part of his own inner world and temptations and perceptions based on manifestations of rage and frustration, and to what degree he has truly acted out what he refers to: the killing of his wife. You know that he is morbidly consumed by her, and wants to consume her, that he feels humiliated and ridiculed and belittled by her behaviour (sleeping with whomever she chooses, it seems, and that everyone else knows this to be the case).

At first his relentless use of certain stock phrases may irritate - at first you think, 'is this just bad writing'; 'doesn't Hidayat/Hedayat KNOW he's repeating himself?!' But of course, HE'S not repeating himself obsessively, rewinding and spiralling down and up and back and forth like a distressed mouse in a maze: you are in his CHARACTER'S world. These stock phrases are typically eery and haunting and remote from our real world, and include 'I am writing only for my shadow', 'I saw a bent old man sitting at the foot of a cypress treet with a young girl [...] The old man was biting the nail of the index finger of his left hand'. He often hears a 'mocking laugh, of a quality to make the hairs on one's body stand on end' (p.98); the laugh issues from his mouth - sometimes he's aware of this, sometimes not and attributes to others, the darkness, another. And there are many other memories/recollected phrases, besides. They're hugely effective; you go from thinking 'WTF?!' to god, this is bloody great!; this guy REALLY is deranged; so you feel for him, yet he could well be a sadistic murderer of his own wife, so you also feel disgusted, appalled; yes, horribly conflicted. The narrative, then, contains real power.

It ends as it begins, the character with his psychosis, his derangement, his endless circling, repeating thoughts and memories and hallucinatory memories; his guilt weighing down on him ... or is that weight he feels on his chest bearing down on him actually the body/remains of his wife? You decide.

This story is well worth the read, despite its cover price (after all, it's only 108 pages in length!). It also deserves a wider reputation, along with the publication and promotion of some of his other works into English; I understand that the author during his lifetime was as the foremost writer of fiction in Iran, and English reviewers alone raved about it - from Tom Stoppard, The Guardian, Ted Hughes, The Times Literary Supplement to Alan Warner. You certainly won't forget it, once read. ...Highly recommended. Now I can't wait to read a collection of his short stories: Three Drops of Blood (Oneworld Modern Classics).

Blind Owl is a great story, but not only that. This book shows the power of Hedayat as a socio-psychologist. I put this book on the top 10 books of 20th century. Hedayat is one of the best of the 20th century writers, relating most closely to Franz Kafka. Read him, if you can!