Customer Reviews

Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

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Just wanted to mention that the ending is... well... After all the magic realism, she abandons the realism part... and delves into the completely abstract. I was enjoying myself fancying that the story was "real" and not just a metaphor for her essentially essay-like study of exile (author is a scholar of exile).... but, near the end, she makes it clear it's a metaphor. Darn. I was enjoying the illusion. Still, a really powerful and highly engaging read. You're not going to waste your money here, I promise.

The first voice heard in this epic novel, is that of Lili, eighteen and haunted by her motherless past. Her mother, Roxanna the Angel, was "once a young woman with watercolor eyes and translucent skin...she could stop the world with her laughter.." and most importantly, "had been so light and delicate, so undisturbed by the rules of gravity and the drudgery of human existence, she had grown wings, one night....and flown into the star-studded night of Iran that claimed her." Lili was five when she saw her mother grow wings and disappear from her life only to return when Lili is eighteen.

Nahai's spellbinding imagery and vocabulary capture readers into the world of Iran and into the life of Roxanna the Angel who was destined to run, before she was even conceived. We readers enter the world of characters such as Shusha the Beautiful, Miriam the Moon, Alexandra the Cat, and Mercedez the Movie Star...where sunflowers can light up a person's existence and the sorrows of destiny and history will hold you captive forever.

I highly recommend this to everyone who likes GREAT books!

Looking for works of fiction by contemporary Iranian authors, I chanced upon Gina Nahai's novel quite by accident. And while I was not tremendously drawn in by the blurb on the back cover, reading the first two pages proved my first impressions wrong. This book is a phenomenal example of modern magical realism found in a society that one would normally not associate with that genre. But moreover, it really brings to light the plight of two groups of people: Iranian jews confined to the ghettos in their own country, and Iranian exiles forced to begin a new life in the United States. Nahai is able to expertly weave the history of her homeland with the fantastic, but does so in a way that is both easy and enjoyable to read.

Nahai captures through beautiful prose the madness and magic of the Jewish ghetto in Teheran, mother and daughter relations and love vs. death. Her surrealistic portraits are truer than snapshots, capturing the essence of each character. Interwoven throughout this painfully lovely tale is the history of modern Iran as lived by its citzenry. Nahai examines the role of the outsider on many levels: unlucky child, unwanted daughter-in-law, social outcast, stranger in a strange land. She concludes that the transcendent power of faith and love is stronger than any code - real or imagined. This is a feast of a novel.

"Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith", Gina Nahai's second novel, recounts the story of Iranian Jewish women, first in Tehran's ghetto and later as immigrants to Los Angeles. This novel continues what Nahai started in her first novel, "Cry of the Peacock". Although the two novels can be read and enjoyed independent of each other, a few of the charachters of "Cry of the Peacock" reapear here. "Moonlight" starts early 20th century in Iran, and takes us all the way to the other side of the globe. It shows us a glimps into the soul of the Iranian Jewish woman who has struggled for survival for thousands of years in a country that never accepted her as a part of itself, to her struggles to make a new life in the "land of chances" because her home didn't even tollerate her presence on it's soil anymore. This is a must-read for anyone curious to find out what happens to people before they come to the United states. It is a wonderful window into the entrapped soul of the Eastern woman and her similarities to the woman of the west. For those of us who are Iranian Jewish exiles living in Los Angeles, this is a clear mirror reflecting how we are seen by each others and forces us to take a look at ourselves with a more objective eye and come out of denial. For those of us who know the people in the book weather in reality or as a representation of something familiar, this is a must-read.

This novel is straightforward storytelling, but the events are straight out of magical realism. The central character is Roxanna the Angel, from a Jewish Iranian family and who is supposed to be a bad-luck child. She cannot escape her destiny, not through friendship or marriage, and finally flies away on white wings, leaving her bereft 5-year-old daughter Lili behind. Lili's broken father, Sohrab, sends the child to an American boarding school, where she is finally reunited with family and friends who have likewise emigrated.

But other characters are as equally unforgettable as Roxanna. The grandmother who cracked and walked naked through the temple; opium-fogged Jacob the Jello; Mercedez the Movie Star, who escapes the Tehran ghetto on her own terms; Alexandra the Cat, a woman with a secret past who takes in Roxanna when her family rejects her as a young girl. An incomplete bond between mother and daughter haunts the family, coming to rest as inexorable Destiny in Roxanna. Or is it?

This is the third book I've read by this author. And so, even though her books are strangely disturbing, I keep coming back for more. Ms. Nahai is a native of Iran. She's also Jewish. This gives her a unique perspective. Her books however, are not political. Instead, they are narratives of love, loss and guilt. But she throws in so much magic realism that her books all read like fairy tales.

In this book we learn about the lovely Roxana, a bad-luck child, born for sorrow. How she lives out her destiny is the skeleton of the story. But it is also the story of her daughter, who, at the age of six, watches her mother fly out of the window of their lavish home.. Yes, I said fly. Roxana has that ability. And this is where the story departs into a reality that exists in the author's imagination and whose words just pulled me into an intriguing story.

Yes, I know it could never have happened this way. But I was too busy swallowing up this book to care. The characters are colorful and each is flawed in some way. Roxana, of course, is the most flawed of all and, as we watch her leave her unhappy home for an even more unhappy existence, there is a seed of recognition of human emotions that are deep inside the human psyche. The setting too, is especially interesting because everything happens in Iran, right before the recent revolution, and then continues in Los Angeles in the community of Iranian refugees.

Each character is indeed larger than life. But I found a little bit of myself in each of them. And the narrative flow is so well done that I just wanted to read and read and read. Definitely recommended.

This is one of my favourite novels. Gina Nahai has often been compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and in many ways this comparison is appropriate, but Nahai's 'magic realism' -- her metaphors, symbols and moods -- are gentler and less deliberately strange than those of Marquez. The ability to fly, dreams which spill into the world, the reversal of night and day -- all these (and other) wonders seem natural to the background of the story, especially in the early sections, which are set in the Tehran Ghetto. I suppose that writers like Marquez and Nahai, if they really have anything in common, share the tendency to write not about how the world really is, but about how it sometimes feels, if such a distinction can be made. The Tehran of Nahai's novel has all the magic of Eastern Fable, but it is not a whimiscal place. There is dust and disappointment as well as wonders. There is a painful voyage of discovery across Turkey and beyond. Nahai is perfect at telling a complex and human tale in glittering prose. She is a beautiful woman and a beautiful writer.

"Written in achingly beautiful prose that lingers in the mind long after the book is finished. This magnificent book can be enjoyed on many different levels--as a tragic love story, a chronicle of a Jewish community forced into exile, a uniquely precious document of a shifting and hitherto invisible culture and, perhaps above all, as a testament to the courage and tenacity of Iranian Jews."

I could not put this book down. It flows with the beautiful language of magical realism. The plot is fascinating and compelling as it traces the impact of Iran's policies toward Jews thru varios regimes until the Shah is deposed and they are forced to flee. However, it does so thru the experiences of Lili, the bad luck child and those who surround her.The use of magical realism enhances the tale which is plot driven unlike some novels driven by magical realism that surrounds a contrived plot. This is a great easy read.