Customer Reviews

The Persian Bride: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This is one of the most beautifully written books I have read in a long time. I found myself marking passages in the prose, so I could return to them later and savor them at leisure, without a rapidly moving plot to deter me. It is also a difficult book to read. As with much good literature, it is necessary to concentrate and read every word. This is not a novel that can be skimmed, or speed read. It is definitely not a light read. Filled with symbolism, and allusions to Iranian culture, the Farsi language, ancient poets and older cities, it is the love story of one couple, and the story of a nation in political, cultural and social upheaval. If you read carefully, with patience, the story will unfold for you like a beautiful Isfahani rose.

A young Englishman goes to Iran in the mid-1970s. Many young American and European "hippies" passed through that country, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through until before the revolution in 1979. Iran was on the way to India, the destination point of many young westerners. The Beatles and other pop stars had made India a mecca for the young with its gurus, cheap drugs, native music, mysticism, etc.. And Persia was a romantic place stop on the way - with its exquisite, impressive countryside, hospitable people, and romantic, gracious and exotic culture. So, John Pitt finds himself in Isfahan, a fairytale of a city. There he meets the enchanting Shrin Farameh. They love. They run away and marry. They struggle to combine cultures and language and to make a world for themselves amidst the chaos and political nightmare that is pre-revolution Iran. Their marriage also carries with it tremendous political & personal consequences. But I won't go there now and spoil one of the more enticing aspects of the plot. Suffice it to say, that the couple is violently & tragically separated. Following the separation, comes suffering that could read like a chapter out of Job. But John is never deterred from his mission to reunite with his wife and the daughter he barely had time to know.

I lived in Iran from 1965 until 1968, and "The Persian Bride" brought so much of my experience back to me. It is a jewel of a novel - a masterpiece!

Of all the places on the earth, I can't think of a more "foreign" place in the world to Westerners than Iran. Everything is different: the food, the architecture, the alphabet, the clothing, the language. Women can't go in public without a veil; all men and women pray submissively, facing the east; and the government is controlled by religious fanatics. And the history of the place goes back to the beginning of civilization. How fortunate then, that we come upon this novel, which purports to give us a glimpse of this society through the eyes of one of our own: an Englishman, at eighteen, who moves there in 1974 and stays there for good. And how unfortunate that this narrative is so clumsy, and so frustratingly difficult to understand.

It is narrated in the first person by John Pitt, a young man who leaves England simply because he doesn't wish to be like everybody else, with their girlfriends and their music. He ends up in Isfahan, Iran, where he is able to get a job teaching English to high-school age girls. He falls in love with one of them; the Persian Bride of the title. It is the sort of life-defining, all-encompassing love that most of us have had only once in our lives, and some of us never at all. He elopes with her, and for about a year, they enjoy a somewhat idyllic honeymoon. But it is an ill fated love: she is the daughter of a prominent member of the Shah's regime. Their relationship is problematic enough initially, but after the takeover of the Ayatollahs it becomes impossible.

She is taken from him and he is imprisoned, first by the Shah and then by the new regime. After many years he is given a chance to redeem himself by fighting for the Iranians against the Iraquis, and he does. He finally escapes from Iran, and spends the rest of the novel traveling through southwest Islamic Asia, searching for his love.

It is a compelling story. Mr. Buchan clearly knows his subject matter and is competent enough to draw believable if somewhat imperfect characters. The love story is also very powerful: the actions of both his narrator and his bride make this clear. But for some reason, either intentionally or unintentionally, the author has created a complex puzzlebox of a narrative that is extremely difficult to understand. I can't tell you how many times I found myself riffling back several pages in order to figure out what I missed.

A telling example is this: the narrator and his bride are travelling in a jeep, right after their elopement, on a sandy path in the desert night. She gets out of the truck and asks him to follow her. He does. About a dozen sentences later, he turns off the engine. Huh? Oh, he was following her in the jeep. I get it, but why doesn't he say so in the first place?

His first meeting with her family is incomprehensible. There are several characters present: the father, a colonel in the air force; the mother, who may or may not also be the princess; the bearded liaison, who is also a servant, I think; and two daughters. A further complication is that much of their dialogue is spoken in untranslated French. I read this passage several times and have still not figured out who is who.

He is separated from his wife while both are trying to escape Iran with the help of two drug smugglers. It is implied that the drug smugglers attempted to kill them both, but we are never really told in a straightforward manner. All we know is that the narrator ends up in prison, and that he doesn't know what happened to the girl. But he was there! Why doesn't he tell us what he knows? Why is this episode shrouded in mystery? Clearly, this omission is intentional. Is it an attempt to blanket the reader with the same confusion as the narrator? Maybe, but again, why?

The book is filled with these confusing incongruities, small and large. Towards the end, he is lying in a filthy hovel in Kabul, dressed in rags, drunk, and unbathed. A well-dressed female French physician he has never met comes to see him. "Do you want to make love to me?" she asks. Huh? Then he meets his nemesis, the afore-mentioned drug smuggler. I think the drug smuggler dies. I know the narrator loses his arm. But how? Again, why doesn't he just say what happened?

Islamic philosophy is strewn liberally throughout the novel. One of the tenets of it seems to be that we poor humans are not meant to know everything, and that we must submissively accept that which is beyond our understanding. Perhaps this is what the author is trying to convey. Perhaps. But, unfortunately, it is not going to be conveyed to the average reader, who after a hundred pages or so will angrily heave the book against the wall, never to pick it up again.

I don't regret reading this book. I feel like I learned a little something of Iran before and after the revolution, and I was touched by the enduring love story. But I'll never read it again. It is a book, sadly, that is destined for obscurity; a ninety-nine cent special in the library basement.

I am still affected by the harsh beauty and exquisite tragedy of the "Persian Bride." James Buchan's writing is wonderfully elegiac and moving. As a story, "The Persian Bride" comprises a bittersweet tale of a hastily contracted cross-cultural "marriage" made under the tensions of imminent revolution. Happy go-lucky John Pitt, a sweet unfocused Englishman bums his way through Isfahan as an English language teacher of dubious merit during the 70's. When he meets Shirin, an Iranian schoolgirl from Isfahan's ruling elite, he appears to meet his destiny. He is a romantic, unreasonable eighteen year old and an orphan. As such, he is not prepared to take on a Persian bride of royal blood.

He is also far too young to realize it. "Pitt" takes Shirin away from her attenuated family, hoping to leave the country. This proves difficult since not only is the Persian Bride's father a calculating Iranian general aiming to fill the imminent power vacuum, but other loftier persons are keeping a discreet eye on the couple. Pitt's persistence and high-flying naivete drive the opening plot of "The Persian Bride" with an especial sweetness, winning the heart of Shirin. John Pitt and Shirin Farameh begin to live as amn and wife at an apex of time that can only grow more dangerous.

The character of Shirin Farameh, the self-same bride is a complicated, rich character. She shows us the unique mettle of Iranian women who adhere to custom while embracing the inevitabilities of modern life. After the elopement, there is inevitable separation wrought by revolution and the thin survival of wrenching upheaval. The amazing romantic undercurrent signified by John and Shirin makes this story palpate.

"The Persian Bride" also offers a painful look at the great unloosening of Iranian society as the ancient regime totters and mullahs take power. "Pitt" maintains his western orientation to the point of peril but he also develops strong sympathies for Persian language and culture. His study of Iranian poetry as a means to apprehend his enigmatic wife is an especially artful aspect of the book.

Buchan's prose is nuanced and mature, not in the least sensationalistic. While the "Persian Bride" is not a thriller per se, the story occurs in what rapidly becomes an excruciating place for Europeans. "Pitt" spends some truly frightening moments in Evin Prison during the hostage crisis (and beyond) where he is interrogated as a spy. It is here that we glimpse the heart-rending beauty of Persian mores and manners, as he coexists with doomed immates who are the scapegoats of the revolutionary regime. Pitt obtains release from prison by volunteering for the Iraqi war front in a desperate attempt to leave prison and search for his family. Despite heartbreaking setbacks, John Pitt never gives up. The haunting emotional context of John and Shirin's romance is the strength of this book.

I highly, highly recommend this book. I hope to see more writing by the author.

Mr. Buchan's knowledge of Persian culture and literature shines through, "word by word, meaning by meaning," in this enchanting novel.

This is by no means an easy book to read, neither in terms of the writing style, nor in terms of its content. The writing style is beautifully complex and poetic, mysterious. One has to really savor the passages. I wanted to read some of the sections over and over again, just because they are written so beautifully.

In terms of the story, although it is fiction, the context is very real and very conceivable. The trials that John Pitts goes through to become reunited with his wife are not far from the truth of what real people have gone through in that corner of the world. Sections of the story can be very sad, but still the book is a real pleasure to read; a tender love story to remember for a long time, with a refreshing writing style, definitely outside of the ordinary!

Reading this novel was like walking into a beautiful dream which descends into a nightmare and recovers the dream again at the very end. I don't understand the problems that some people had with it. The plot is a little murky but no more confusing that a host of other books I've read and less so than some. For me the indistinctness of it contributed to It's dream like quality. The writing, especially describing the exotic locations is exquisite and I feel like I've visited all of them. Perhaps its not for the very straightforward plot oriented but for me it was unforgettable.

The conservative British magazine The Spectator described this novel as "A book of astonishing intellectual grandeur and integrity... Airy, graceful, and big with truth, it feels like a major statement of confidence, not just by an English novelist but by the English novel... There is really no word for it but 'masterpiece.'"

Exactly.

The story follows John Pitt, an 18-year-old drifter who is teaching in Isfahan, Iran, in 1974. He falls in love with Shirin, a 16-year-old girl, whose father happens to be an ambitious general in the Shah's air force. After they elope -- with the help of an opium-addicted Russian diplomat -- they spend a luminous year together in the Russian's walled villa on the sea. When they attempt to escape Iran, they are separated by vicious drug smugglers. The last half of the book follows John as he survives years and torture in revolutionary prisons, fights Iraq alongside boys and old men as an Iranian soldier, travels to Kashmir and Afghanistan, all searching for Shirin and his daughter.

That plot evidently makes it a "thriller" for some of the British press reviewers, but most Americans will agree that James Buchan's writing makes it something other. This book is rather a layered, graceful puzzle.

The first part of the book, John and Shirin's love story, is dreamlike. John at one point acknowleges that he's risking their lives by not getting them back to Europe. His judgment is that of an immature 18-year-old lovestruck dreamer -- which is what he is.

Here they are fleeing to the villa:

"In my arms, she fluttered with exciement and fear. Then she vanished. I stared miserably into the darkness. On the road, eighteen-wheelers roared and hooted. The moon rose to my right. My head jangled with the day. Her face and lips, the way she carried the can and tipped the water in the radiator, the trailing of her chador, lost their clarity, became mangled, rough and indecent. I smelled her scent, of salt and roses and some quintessential herness, on my chest and fingers. I felt drenched in femininity. Certain words -- 'pushidegi' covering, and by extension the mental attitudes in girls that are the effects or counterparts of veiling, such as ambiguity, inversion, concealment, intrigue or deceit; 'eish' meaning the delights of this worldly existence; 'kamrani,' the attainment of a young man's desire -- made maddening calligraphic shapes in my mind. I was depressed by missed opportunities: that we could have slept together one more time and still have reached here in the night. I thought: If we make it to the house, I am not going to stir from her bed for a year."

Perhaps a year later, here is Shirin:

"You do not think very much, John. I suppose it is not necessary for an Englishman to think, any more than it is necessary for an Englishman to pray. For that reason, your servant must think and pray not just for her poor self, but for the entire family. Our life in this garden cannot go on forever. We will be separated, or some other misfortune will befall us. Your servant is a mere woman. When you order me to kiss you, I obey, and the pleasure it gives me arises chiefly but not exclusively in my obedience. For I belieive and hope that out of those kisses you might remember one kiss. Or you might remember this doorway, the rustle of my skirt and chador, the taste of fresh herbs and buttermilk from a cold steel cup, the warmth of my bust and neck in the morning, the scent of roses from the orchard, the damp of my lap. Each one is a thread that ties us -- or rather, though these threads must snap under ther ressure of separation yet still there will be one intact -- and you will coil it up around your wrist and make your way back to your poor bride and wretched child."

It mustn't be imagined from this that Shirin is painted as anything but the stronger of the two. When they first arrive at the villa, she is the one who kills the snakes, bare-handed, that infest the place. Later, in a parallel, she staves off the double-crossing drug smugglers, protecting herself and her baby alone.

Here she warns John not to try to take their baby from her:

She spoke with the slowness of a nightmare. She said: "Mr Pitt, if you intend to take my Layly from me,, you shall first have to kill me. For otherwise I shall kill you."

"I have asked you before, ma'am, not to threaten me."

"It is not a threat, but the only solution to this difficulty."

Buchan gracefully shows us life's beauty and terror, but he weaves through magic, archetypal Iranian stories, poetry and politics as well.

Here, in Kashmir, he's talking with a student:

"Look, I've been there and you haven't. And to Iran as well. You must understand that the Iranian Revolution was not the beginning of something, but the end; not a revival of political Islam but its swansong. The effect of the Revolution has not been to revive religion in Iran but to make it hateful to all but the portion of the population that has a material interest in it, that gets its bread and water from the mosque. Without the war, the revolution would have lost its vigour long ago and its power to persuade. It survives only through control exercised on the minds of the living by the blood of young men and children who went singing to their deaths. Two hundred thousand boys died to prove that Islam could not be exported evwen to Iraq, home of one of history's most tyrannical despotisms."

I was surpirsed by my speechifying.

"Javed, you say that you want freedom, but it is not freedom you want but control. You and your friends want to close the hotels and the cinemas..."

"Yes. Life here is immoral. There are illicit liaisons..."

"Rubbish, Javed. Kashmiri girls are very chaste."

He trembled. I could see I had gone too far, for he hated his inexperience and I had made fun of it....

Buchan brings his hero's journey back to Isfahan, as heroes must return to their beginnings. Does he find his family? Buchan ends the book in exactly the right way to complete his character.

A verse from the end:

Luck and Joy and Grief and I
Set off together into the world of existence
Luck lay down and Joy ran off
But Grief and I go wandering on.

Yes, it's a masterpiece. For once the blurb doesn't lie. If you wish to know what this book is 'about', then read the editiorial reviews. I won't restate the premise and plot here. All I can do is provide one subjective response. It's simply the best book I''ve read all year.

A book that with grace and simplicity is full of such tenderness and harshness, dream and reality, ignorance and self-knowledge. It's unsparing, unsentimental, unforgettable, and impossibly moving. Here is a tale of a love and a land, a tale of two cultures, a tale of a boy and a girl that skewers the heart - one that remains like a splinter in the mind. With the book's last sentence I wept for a love found and lost and if it were my own. In immersing one its joy and pain, this book has that rare and remarkable ability to make one feel more alive.

In a time when so many Americans are attempting to understand Islamic cultures and recent history of this part of the world, Buchan offers a personal, dreamlike interpretation. The book is difficult to read at times unless one remembers that it is a deeply introspective dream- indeed a nightmare!- without the lucidity of a step by step chronology. The personal trials of one young American who is enchanted by this culture has a rhythm that is similar to the sound of the flute against the heavy drum beat of history in the background.

The book is sprinkled throughout with lines of poetry from former centuries that is still vital, living and reverberating in the thought processes of the people. There was a sense of poetry used like hip-hop verses are now-to express a deep poignancy of culture and belief system unlike any that most Westerners understand.

I also had a sense of the writing being like a Persian minature, a central "picture" with myriad details drawing the reader into and out of the scene.

For me, this category of literature is extremely exciting. As we are exposed to more and more books written about or by authors outside Western culture, our opinions on what is happening in the political world can only become more humanitarian, more understanding and, hopefully, decisions will be made more intelligently.

Compare the Iranian general with the character in "House of Sand and Fog" the relationship in "Nino and Ali" and the characters in "Flesh, Blood and Bone", the interaction of cultures in "Balzac and the little Chinese seanstress", the class system in "A Fine Balance", "Caucasia" multiracial interactions in the US, "Yo!", "Anil's Ghost", etc..

Wow, what exciting times for literature!

In this book, you experience the spiritual journey that the main character goes through because of his love of a woman. This is told against the backdrop of the geopolitical situations in the middle east from the seventies to the nineties. I experienced what felt like a lifetime within the pages of this book.

This novel starts off with great promise, with an interesting, coherent plot, intriguing characters, and truly beautiful writing. It would be worth reading at least the first half of the novel just to appreciate Buchan's mastery of the language. Unfortunately, the novel peaks halfway through. I wasn't thrilled with the abrupt shift in the narrative, but I might have been less disturbed by it had the second half of the book at least been written with as much clarity as the first half. Everything was less convincing, perhaps because it all became quite confusing. Also, I found the ending quite vague and unconvincing - it certainly doesn't stand up to everything that preceded it, if the novel is meant to be a "modern epic". Still, Buchan gets full marks for his attention to detail,and for his ability to create sumptuous, atmospheric prose.