Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Window To Contemporary Iran, October 23, 2005
This is an excellent book for everyone who wishes to learn about life in Iran in past 30 years. Some of most important events of past 30 years shape stories and poems in this book. For instance "The Victory Chronicle of the Magi" happens during 1979 revolution while other stories deal with Iran-Iraq war, Iranians leaving Iran for other lands, and many more events. Some stories even go back further since few authors in discussing background of their characters describe events in Iranian history dating back to more than 70 years ago. This book is a must read for Iranians living outside Iran. Sentences such as:"Mash-Mohammad pours the tea in the saucer and blows on it." bring back memories and reading this book familiarizes Iranian diaspora with new generation of writers and poets such as "Behnam Dayani", "Partow Nuriala", "Farkhondeh Aghai", and many more names.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
After the revolution . . ., September 30, 2006
It is as if a kind of iron curtain fell between Iran and the U.S. after the fall of the Shah in 1979. This collection of prose and poetry by Iranian writers lifts that curtain for a glimpse of that country's recent past through the eyes of many of its most creative writers.
For me, the most interesting selection was an excerpt from Ahmad Mahmud's novel "Scorched Earth," about ordinary citizens experiencing the invasion of Iraq in 1980. I also liked the excerpt from Esmail Fassih's novel "Sorraya in a Coma," which follows a traveler on an arduous journey by bus from Iran to Turkey. Reza Farrokhfal's "Ah, Istanbul" tells a sad story of an older writer, about to leave Iran, whose manuscript is considered unpublishable by a young editor's assistant. Goli Taraghi's "In Another Place" is a psychological study describing the coming apart of an ideal marriage. Farkhondeh Aghai's "A Little Secret" tells of a woman's long stay in a hospital ward, where a young man wounded in the war appeals to a young sweetheart on a nearby telephone.
Iranians abroad will surely find this collection more illuminating and rewarding than westerners simply because the references to daily life and Iranian culture and history often require explanatory footnotes that can't always explain enough. Literary styles take some getting used to, as well. For readers of western literature, these stories and excerpts will seem slow going and repetitive before they reach a conclusion that sometimes seems to lose something in the translation. But as many of these 43 writers have never been translated into English, this is an opportunity to experience a world that has been largely hidden from view. And that's reason enough to give it a read.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Largest English-Language Collection So Far of Post-1979 Writing by Iranians, July 20, 2009
This book came out in 2005 and focused on prose and poetry published originally in Persian since the 1979 revolution, by writers in Iran and abroad. It contained 66 works by 43 authors. There were 17 short stories, 5 excerpts from novels, and 44 poems.
Most of the prose works were clearly dated and were published between 1980 and about 2001, with nearly all from the 1980s and 90s. The poetry comprised about 20% of the book, with the year of original publication not provided. Of all the writers in the collection, 13 were women.
The authors were roughly from three generations, chosen by Iranian critics on the basis of quality. Among the prose writers, the oldest were Simin Daneshvar (1921-), Iraj Pezeshkzad (1928-), Ahmad Mahmud (1931-2002), and Taghi Modarressi (1931-97). The youngest were Farideh Kheradmand (1957-), Shahriar Mandanipour (1957-) and Seyyed Ebrahim Nabavi (1958-). Others included Esmail Fassih (1935-), Hushang Golshiri (1937-2000), Goli Taraghi (1939-), Mahmud Dowlatabadi (1940-), Hadi Khorsandi (1943-), Nassim Khaksar (1944-), Shahrnush Parsipur (1946-), Ghazaleh Alizadeh (1948-96), Moniru Ravanipur (1954-) and Gahzi Rabihavi (1956-).
Important novels that were excerpted included Ahmad Mahmud's Scorched Earth (1982), which described a town's experience of the outbreak of war with Iraq, Fassih's Sorraya in a Coma (1983), about its narrator's journey from Tehran to Paris, and Parsipur's Women without Men (published in 1989 but written more than a decade earlier), about the experiences of five strong women.
In connection with writing during the period, the editor's introduction mentioned briefly the 1979 revolution, the subsequent political purges, economic hardship, religious repression and censorship, and the brutal 1980-88 war with Iraq. Outside the scope of the anthology but definitely in the background were the combination of modernization and repression under the Shah's regime, the growth of leftist, nationalist and religious opposition to it, and the coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 that had restored the Shah to power and been supported by Great Britain and the United States.
In the near present, another relevant factor was the emigration of many writers, both before and after the revolution: at the time the collection was published, 11 of the 22 prose writers anthologized, and 11 of the 21 poets, were living abroad or had died in exile. Since this book was published, 2 more of the prose writers have also left Iran (Ravanipur, Mandanipour).
The prose in the collection was described as ranging from realism and social realism, to an Iranian version of magical realism, to complex psychological stream of consciousness, to various styles of postmodern prose, often allegorical or allusive. Some of the authors' works were concerned with the war with Iraq (Ahmad, Ahgai), or with political events of the Mossadegh period (Alizadeh). Others focused on the condition of men or women in the present day, in ways that were understandable (Simin Daneshvar, Golshiri, Dowlatabadi, Parsipur, Reza Farrokhfal, Ravanipur, Rabihavi, Kheradmand) or more experimental and opaque (Modarressi, Taraghi, Reza Daneshvar, Asghar Abdollahi, Mandanipour). Some writers were concerned humorously or darkly with exile (Pezeshkzad, Khorsandi, Khaksar) or in more light-hearted ways with youth (Seyyed Ebrahim Nabavi, Behnam Dayani).
More than a tenth of the space in the book was given to one short story by Taraghi, which probed the emotional world of a character in extreme detail, to a point beyond my grasp. Most enjoyed were a short story by Ravanipur in which an educated young woman returned to her village and found it in the grip of custom and superstition, and in which feelings, sights, sounds and smells were described with great power. The excerpt from Fassih's novel described a long journey by bus during wartime to the border with Turkey, in which the narrator's sense of humor, powers of observation and sophistication came through clearly. Simin Daneshvar's short story concerned problems faced by a schoolgirl, blending realism and surrealism. Khaksar's story caught well the feeling of displacement of an outsider in Europe.
Of the poets, the oldest were Nader Naderpur (1919-2000), Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000), and Simin Behbahani (1927-). The youngest were Roya Hakakian (1966-), Ziba Karbasi (1974-) and Granaz Moussavi (1974-). Also included were Esmail Khoi (1938-), the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (1940-) and Partow Nooriala (1946-). Naderpur and Khoi in particular were cited as poets of exile.
A brief introduction to the poetry mentioned the influence of 19th century Romantic poetry and later modernism from Europe, and the influence of leftist, socially committed poetry from the 1930s, 60s and 70s. Centuries earlier, the court poetry between the 900s and 1300s, by names such as Rudaki, Ferdowsi, Manuchehri, Omar Khayyam, Nezami, Attar, Rumi and Hafez, was described as embodying a rich oral tradition that provided a foundation for many later poets.
Most of the works in this section were beyond my understanding, but a few were very moving: Shamlou's "In This Blind Alley," which criticized the narrow-mindedness of the censor and described a turning inward to protect against the loss of important values; Khoi's "Outlandia," which described the alienation felt by an outsider in a Western land, Nuriala's "I Am Human," a beautiful statement of what it meant to be human, and Kiarostami's "Walking with the Wind," which contained minute observations of nature, taken like snapshots. A refrain from Shamlou's poem provided the source for the anthology's title: "In this crooked blind alley, as the chill descends / they feed fires / with logs of song and poetry. / Hazard not a thought: / These are strange times, my dear . . . . / Satan, drunk on victory, / squats at the feast of our undoing. / Let's hide God in the larder."
Other poems of interest were Hakakian's poem about the need to move forward after breaking with a lover, getting up and walking away from the tombstone of her memory. A poem by Mehdi Akhavan-Saless expressing extravagant love for the poets, landscape and earlier, Zoroastrian religion of his homeland. A poem by Reza Baraheni that might've been written by a Western modernist, though it also incorporated references to Persian court poets. And something by Shams Langerudi invoking Saladdin and referring to the "harlots of the Gulf" whom the world's banks had enriched.
I felt grateful for the window into Iranian creative writing that this anthology provided. This book is one of the few large options available for readers looking for English-language collections of creative writing by Iranians. It might be read together with the other large collection, Stories from Iran: A Chicago Anthology 1921-1991 (1992), which covered a mostly earlier period, focused on prose and included many writers who were outside the scope of the present anthology.
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by Shahrnush Parsipur
by Shahriar Mandanipour
