Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran [Paperback]

Shahrnush Parsipur (Author), Persis Karim (Afterword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2004 | ISBN-10: 1558614524 | ISBN-13: 978-1558614529 | Edition: 4th

Shortly after the 1989 publication of Women Without Men in her native Iran, Shahrnush Parsipur was arrested and jailed for her frank and defiant portrayal of women’s sexuality. Now banned in Iran, this small masterpiece was eventually translated into several languages and introduces U.S. readers to the work of a brilliant Persian writer. With a tone that is stark, and bold, Women Without Men creates an evocative allegory of life for contemporary Iranian women. In the interwoven -destinies of five women, simple situations—such as walking down a road or leaving the house—become, in the tumult of post-WW II Iran, horrific and defiant as women escape the narrow confines of family and society—only to face daunting new challenges.

Now in political exile, Shahrnush Parsipur lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of several short story collections including Touba and the Meaning of Night.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Using the techniques of both the fabulist and the polemicist, Paripur (Prison Memoirs) continues her protest against traditional Persian gender relations in this charming yet powerful novella. Imprisoned once for her dissident views, Paripur, a native of Iran, offers her five characters the opportunity to escape the relationships and mores that constrain them. All of the characters are led to the same metaphorical magic garden, a transcendent, timeless place where they are free to decide their fates. In most instances, this amounts to a rejection of men and marriage. Like Ovid's Daphne, Mahdokht transforms herself into a tree in order to prevent the shameful loss of her virginity. Munis, a 38-year-old virgin, is attacked and killed by her brother for refusing to obey him. She rises from the dead a psychic, heads for the garden and is raped along the way. Farrokhlaqa, a wealthy matron, accidentally kills her oppressive husband of 32 years. She then buys the magical garden where the women congregate. Only Zarrinkolah, the prostitute, discovers wedded bliss when she marries the "good gardener." The voices of the five separate narrators--delicately connected by plot and circumstance--give us variations on the theme of the mistreatment of women in contemporary Iran.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Parsipur here synthesizes the voices of five women in contemporary Iran. Women without men?a prostitute, two unmarried women, a housewife, and a teacher?they all face serious oppression largely because of gender discrimination, cultural traditions, and notions of virginity and women's sexuality. They also seek and find freedom and some solace in the same garden. This garden, located in Karaj, near Tehran, becomes their utopia; the teacher Mahdokht becomes so distraught that she decides to plant herself like a tree in the garden and thus escape reality. Not Parsipur's first work of fiction on women in Iranian society, this novel often reads like a fairy tale, but it launches a strong statement about gender relations in Parsipur's home country. Parsipur currently lives in the United States. Recommended for fiction collections.?Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon Libs., Eugene
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY; 4th edition (March 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558614524
• ISBN-13: 978-1558614529
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.6 x 7.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #783,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A little gem!!! May 8, 2001

By mishalew

Format:Hardcover

Though I stumbled upon the novel by accident, I must admit this book was well worth finding. The stories were simply written but were almost deceivingly fully loaded-- full of conflicting values, political ideology and agendas, and societal turmoil. The compilation of separate women's lives, so different from one another, but joined together by a common thread, hearkens back to a similar style of tale-telling found in many other cultures, such as Amy Tan's novel 'The Joy Luck Club' and the popular film 'How to Make an American Quilt'. Rather than choosing to write a politicized essay or thesis which reaches only a certain segment of the educated and politically literate population, Parsipur chooses to write fiction, laced with raw truths and posessing a clear agenda.

Such tales are typical of the kind that are passed down from generation to generation in order to educate the young about their society's morals or possible pitfalls that may entrap those who stray from the accepted norm. This is not dissimilar from urban legends that adults in American society pass amongst themselves or the fairy tales laced with truths that young children are told before bedtime.

Sometimes the most volitile information is passed down and understood by the most simple or innocuous means, and I think that is a conscious choice that Parsipur has made with this book. She chooses to uncover the double standard that both male and female society is guilty of upholding, the notion of virginity (and the understanding of what it is and what it means), and socially-sanctioned ideas of morality, mortality, violence, and inter-gender relationships through stories that allow the reader to look at how different women deal with the society that they live in.

Because Parsipur does not clearly lay out a list of evils that Iranian society proportedly commits, nor does she specifically glorify other elements of her society, her writing raises many more questions for the reader to ponder. By making the problems personal for each woman, some of the issues that a reader would initally consider black and white suddenly turn grey, which in turn, leads to a greater depth of meaning in her work.

In sum, I was very impressed by the book's simplicity, and appreciative for the brief glimpse through the window to Iranian society that it offered.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The complexity of human nature November 16, 2008

By Brian H. Appleton VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Dear fellow readers,

I have become a personal friend of the author, Shahrnush Parsipur recently as fortunately we both reside in Northern California now. We have common interests as I am an Anglo American who lived in Iran before,during and four months after the revolution and really didn't want to leave. I have some understanding of the complexity of Iranian society. There have been a few articles recently like last summer's National Geographic which try to explain how the private side of Iranians remains very impenetrably private and their public image is one of friendship, hospitality and generosity because this is how they have survived centuries of being invaded and conquered....sugar coated lies and taroff (honorifics)...making total strangers feel good and everyone feel important...while hiding from them what you really think...it is bitter sweet, it is something I love and hate...

When I read this "magical realism" or surreal style of writing, I not only recognized Iranian social complexity but in fact a certain universality about human nature and what experts we human beings are at deceit, especially self deception and denile. The aspiring socialite starving for fame and glamourous life, Farrokhlaga finally finds it in the end by marrying an older diplomat and living abroad, no romance but life style she wanted after years of trying to be the hostess of literary salons or become a member of parliament or even write poetry, all without success because other than her sophisticated physical beauty she had no real talent.

Fazieh always in love with Amir, her best friend Munis's brother, finally settles for being his secret second wife on the side with a seperate houshold.

The author on the one hand captures how in real life everything is compromise. Nothing is black and white or pure like we are told it is supposed to be as children, in real life and yet at the same time the author tells fairy tales in this book and takes us into metaphysical realms with ease having come to realize that despite our dualistic nature, essentially we are spiritual beings with spiritual as well as earthly needs. We are capable not only of wickedness but also redemption, not only of hiding with our fears in the darkness but basking with our glories in the sunlight... For me, the gardener represents what goodness a man without lust is capable of and he is the antithesis of the first gardener who in a few short sentences manages to seduce a 15 year old servant girl and then disappears into the night.

It is not just Iranian society but all society where people worry about their social image, their reputation, their virginity...it is all societies where people want their daughters to marry "well" or into a "good" family and then the young couples sacrifice their personal happiness and true love for years in the process and resort to total animosity, misery or affairs, divorce, etc. Shahrnush captures that quality of life that is disturbed. There is something unsettled about human nature, never completely happy, always striving to relieve boredom or find something new to obsess about til that grows tiresome and then it is on to the next conquest, or country or party or husband or or or...to be totally satisfied with life is to be dead...

Still in a few short pages, she does a masterful job of painting a picture of the social rot, the exploitation of women, the vulnerability of women and how they manage to escape it; their ability to survive and carry on despite the social and political pressures...and although the particular fungus she describes is Iranian, it grows everywhere in one stripe or another...and life is a disease with no cure, life is terminal...and that said some of her most beautiful pages present death as a crystalline and light transcendence, as procreation and bounty in nature like the person tree turning into a hill of seeds to be carried to all corners of the earth by wind and wave...which was what she always wanted in life...

It's definately worth a read, it has the surreal beauty of South American writers like Borges, the portrayal of life's absurdity stuck in a loop of Kafka and the existentialism of Camus...and I look forward to reading her "Tuba and the Meaning of Night" and hope that the other dozen books of hers will be translated soon.

She recently became a US citizen and I wish her every success and happiness in her new country.

Brian H. Appleton

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing January 28, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Women without Men is another entry in the growing category of Iranian cultural exports to the U.S., and one of the best. Like the Cannes-winning film The White Balloon, Women without Men presents a much different view of Iranian life than readers might expect based on reports from the evening news--a nuanced, subtle, self-reflexive society much concerned with the role of art in both everyday life and in the turbulent cultural politics of the nation. The story of a group of diverse Iranian women who forge a brief-lived utopian society, Women without Men also addresses, in startling, beautiful prose, the lives of women in any modern society. The fact that these stories can be transposed to, and understood by, Americans, is one of the pleasant surprises of the book; this isn't just a novel for scholars, but for anyone looking for a story that's both entertaining and profound. And, the translators, one Iranian and one American, have done a fabulous job in rendering the Persian into lucid English. I give this book five stars because, even though it's a small book, as one of the very few first rate translations of contemporary Iranian literature, it should be at the top of the reading list for anyone interested in international writing.