Customer Reviews

Persian Girls: A Memoir

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read "Persian Girls" very quickly. I think this was in large part due to the simplicity, yet power, of the writing. The only complaint I have with the memoir is that at times it felt that there was something under the surface that the author still could not say about her relationships with the women in her life. There is a feeling of non-resolution, but--strangely enough--I also felt the author was comfortable with that ambiguity.

I think all women should read this book, especially women in America. I already knew a good bit about the repression of women in other countries but the simple, straightforward matter in which Rachlin recounts her life is one that will be easy for anyone to read. Easy in the reading, but sad in the subject matter.

There is probably a lot that could be said about this memoir but for me--on a personal note--I came away wanting to know more about the Iranian women I have known throughout my life (my uncle married an Iranian woman) and what brought them to this country. Did they ever see their families after they left? How much of their culture do they still feel drawn to etc?

Nothing works like good non-fiction to get me thinking about myself and what I bring to the world.

Good read. (I read over the span of two flights, so I would suggest it for a plane read for sure!)

Well, Mrs. Rachlin has gained another fan.
I was just mesmerized with the weave of her writings, in "Persian Girls". A fascinating depiction of the life, culture and traditions in Iran as she experienced them, and how they related to and affected her family and friends.
I reccomend this book as a good read.

Thank you Nahid Rachlin...

After chancing upon a diminuative author reading a startlingly gutsy memoir to a bookstore audience, I ordered and read for myself the courageous adventures of Ms. Rachlin. The author's uncompromising rebelliousness coupled with her intense love for a sister and an aunt fuels the book. Bejeweled with many Iranian cultural details, (foods, fabrics, flowers, fountains, families, etc.), lovingly and simply described and set at the menacing center of turbulent historical and individual events, Nahid Rachlin has forged a spare, luminous memoir of human sorrows and victories. I think other readers will wish, as I did, that the book was longer.

This book kept me up all night. Among other things it gave me a glimpse into the inner workings of Iranian family life and the author's creative development. As a fan of Nahid Rachlin's fiction, I wanted to know more about her own life; Persian Girls has given me an insight into that life and its emotional conflict. It reveals the suffering that many women, among them her sister, and the aunt who raised her as a child, endure in many Islamic cultures--the limitations imposed on them by the legal system and their families, especially the husbands who rule over them with tyrannical power. The oppressiveness and the pain of separation the author endured when her father took her away from her aunt the only mother she knew as a child (and forced her to live with him and her biological mother and siblings) are deeply conveyed. And so is the strength the author found within herself that allowed her to break away from these restrictions and create another life in America.

This book is a "must read." I have never read a more touching non-fiction book. The writing is superb and it is from the heart. I was not able to put the book down and anyone vaguely interested in the subject matter will come to the same conclusion.

For me, the most interesting thing about Rachlin's very interesting memoir was the incredible strength she showed in forging a life for herself that was so different from the culture she was born into in Iran and for which she had very little or no family support. It is a very personal tale of courage. Rachlin was given to an aunt to raise shortly after her birth and then wrenchingly, for both Rachlin and her aunt, taken away from her when she was about 8. I suspect it was this horrible experience that later gave Rachlin the courage to leave her family to attend college on a scholarship in the United States and to live an independent, solitary and self-sufficient existence in the United States for awhile before she met her husband.

If I am at all disappointed with this book it is because of the emphasis Rachlin places on arranged marriages as the cause of unhappiness in women in the culture she was born into. Rachlin's sister was in an abusive arranged marriage as were other women in her family. I know some couples who are in very happy arranged marriages and I know a lot of women who are very unhappy in marriages of their own making. The divorce rate in the United States certainly attests to that.

No, I would not have liked my life and/or marriage determined for me. And I value the ability to chart my own course. But Rachlin goes too far I believe when she seemingly equates arranged marriages with unhappiness and abuse.

But overwhelmingly, this is a very interesting, and although somewhat sad, nonetheless a charming book.

If you want to know what it's like to be a woman in Iran and yet are not looking for simplistic and schmaltzy versions such that is dished by the Hollywood from time to time, then look no further than Mrs. Rachlin's superb account of her coming-of-age in this eye-openning memoir. Mrs. Rachlin's honest and passionate book describes in measured details her disillusionment with the political order as she is exposed to male brutality in both her immediate environs and in the larger society. I loved the fact that she doesn't overwhelm you with irrelevant nuances and sticks to the story, her story, which is spellbinding and reads like a novel. Thank you Mrs. Rachlin.

I just finished Persian Girls. Once I was into it I couldn't stop reading. I cried all alone in my chair reading Bijan's beautiful, heartbreaking letter that Pari never got. My own words seem lost now, still in the thrall of this tale as I am --so writing a review is hard. What a wonderful person Bijan is or was! I can't stand the thought that he may no longer be alive. Its amazing what this author has accomplished with the story she tells of Iranian women in a single family. The story is so big and so timely and so tragic --an individual tragedy of the first order with world history in the background. Its an incredible book and everybody should be buying it.

This is a beautiful, evocative memoir told with tremendous feeling and emotion. The author transported me to each time and place in her life and I almost felt that I was sitting on her shoulders. I have about 30 more pages to read, and am doing so ever so slowly because I don't want the story to end. I thank the author for sharing her story. This is truly a lovely, moving book.

In this poignant,intensely personal and informative memoir Nahid Rachlin traces her life from her childhood under the Shah, through the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which she witnessed from America, where she was living at that point, to a bittersweet reunion with a family both shattered and healed by the tragedies that have befallen them. The way her life goes in a different direction from that of her beloved sister, as she remains in Iran and she comes to the U.S., offers great insights into the dynamics of the culture they lived in and how it affected each. It is a story of painful separations, heartbreaking losses, and hard-won freedoms. It has the same mesmerizing power as her novels, lingering in the mind after we have finished reading the book.