She is known in the West as the Sylvia Plath of Iran. As if the name Forugh Farrokhzad is not enough.
Although I understand the comparison because of the early and tragic deaths, of troubled lives we wouldn’t hope to emulate but whose courage to immortalize raw emotion we secretly envy, the turbulent relationships, also their notoriety of speaking against the constraints that society imposed on women and paving the way for other women in literature — but Forugh Farrokhzad is Forugh Farrokhzad to me. The rebel poet of Iran.
Hers is one of the strongest female voices in Iranian literature. I first came across her poems in an anthology featuring a thousand years of Persian poetry by women and in a film by Abbas Kiarostami, and subsequently the haunting poetry that she extended to filmmaking in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬. It is an extremely moving and artistic documentary about a leper colony in Azerbaijan, from where she afterwards adopted a son of the colony’s two inhabitants.
When I learned that Jasmin Darznik had written a well-researched book on her life, I was intrigued. Written in the first person in a most lyrical and revealing voice with generous layers of pain and art, this is that book.
As soon as my eyes traced the first line, the words held my face in its hands, implored me to keep looking it in the eye, made me reread and reread sentences and paragraphs for the sheer texture and the lushness of its polyphony; even when it became too brutal, even when it felt too much, it would not let me look away.
I have not experienced a novel this heartbreakingly breathtaking since Ondaatje and de Bernières — for its beauty, for its pain, for its music, for its truths.
This is a poetic education on the conflict in Afghanistan with an intricately wrought storyline and a web of characters that could only have been written so painstakingly.
Set in a time when its people were still in a daze, trying to assess who, what, and how much was left or if there was anything left at all, it was that period after the fall of the Twin Towers in New York, and as retribution, the collapse of the Taliban.
But for many days now, I have been waking up to updates of the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan; and here I am reading a book published in 2008 that carries this ominous line: “The Americans should not exult: the war hasn’t ended. The real war is about to begin.”
A Nobel laureate and a Pulitzer winner. Two books with their fair share of advocates and detractors. But a discerning reader will understand both the praise and the criticism.
Naipaul traveled to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia for six months to examine the heightening Islamic fundamentalism in countries with a pre-Islamic history but have become theocratic states.
Brooks, stationed in Cairo for six years as a journalist, explored Egypt, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states of the Persian Gulf, to ask a specific question: “𝘐𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘮 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯. 𝘚𝘰 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘪𝘮 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘥?” “𝘈𝘯𝘺 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘰 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘭𝘦 𝘌𝘢𝘴𝘵, 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘴𝘶𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘪𝘵 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵,” she observed. And this is what the world especially fears in the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
I read the Naipaul earlier in August but wasn’t quite sure what to say about it openly. Naipaul’s disregard for political correctness is sometimes shocking, but his directness can also be refreshing. Brooks’ courage is admirable and her accounts overwhelming; and made more fascinating by personal interviews with Salman Rushdie, Naguib Mahfouz, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s daughter Zahra, King Hussein and Queen Noor of Jordan. Whether the reader ends up appreciating the scrutiny or not, one has to admit that both authors have written only the truth derived from their interaction with the people.
One was published in 1981, the other in 1995. Some information is dated because much has changed in the world since then, but much hasn’t either. What remains unchanged in the matters discussed is the reason why these two books are still valuable and pertinent.
There are books, and then there are literary giants. The thing about the latter is that they do not announce their importance, their work speaks for them and you simply know you are in the presence of one.
This does not fall in the beautiful category. This one takes its place alongside Orwell’s 𝟭𝟵𝟴𝟰 and Bradbury’s 𝘍𝘢𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘵 𝟰𝟱𝟭.
Someone told me in jest that maybe I should take a break from my reading repertoire because what is happening in certain parts of the world of late uncannily intersects with it. Veering westward only found a disquieting relevance in this Ismail Kadare dystopian masterpiece.
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘴 is not what the title might immediately imply, but at the same time, it is exactly what the name implies: “The task of our Palace of Dreams, which was created directly by the reigning Sultan, is to classify and examine not the isolated dreams of certain individuals… but the ‘Tabir’ as a whole: in other words, all the dreams of all citizens without exception…
…the Padishah decreed that no dream, not even one dreamed in the remotest part of the empire on the most ordinary day by the most godforsaken creature, must fail to be examined by the Tabir Sarrail.”
Beware the authorities and the institutions that take away even the freedom of your dreams. They exist in the real world.
Imagine my delight when I opened this recently acquired secondhand book and discovered that it was a signed copy!
_ _ _
Nagasaki just before the bomb dropped in 1945, Delhi at the cusp of the partition that created Pakistan in 1947, Istanbul briefly, life in Pakistan in the early 1980s where Islamic fundamentalism began to be felt, post-9/11 New York, Afghanistan amid the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Iran much more briefly than Istanbul, and back to North America — this is where the book takes you.
Now I understand why Salman Rushdie described Kamila Shamsie as a “writer of immense ambition and strength.” The scope of this novel is ambitious, and to succeed in carrying it out is where her strength manifests.
Although admittedly, this will not be one of the books I would immediately recommend if asked to suggest a Pakistani work, I have to say that it also gave me much. Through the characters the reader encounters the nuances of what it felt to be an ordinary German or Japanese after the Second World War, to be English in India during the last days of the British Empire, to be Muslim in India before the partition, to be a member of the mujahideen that would drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan, to be an American in the midst of all these, and simply to be human in the face of war and conflict.
To humanize what we tend to generalize is what this novel does best. This one is certainly not bereft of poetry and pain.
Out of all the post-Iranian Revolution books I have encountered, this one is rather unusual. Here, the revolution takes a backseat. Or does it?
Published in 2020, perhaps it is heralding the era of significant literature on the revolution’s longterm effects.
Named after the prophet Jonah, Yunus is a bus driver arrested during a strike, and sent to Tehran’s most notorious prison where his descent into absurdity deepens.
At first glance, the physical belly of the whale is Evin prison. But given a closer look, the psychological belly of the whale is madness and totalitarian politics from which there is no reprieve for this Yunus; and its haunting effects on the psyche, lasting.
The novel is unnerving, but even more so when the reader remembers scripture and realizes… Wasn’t the prophet Jonah sent to warn the people?
— “A contemporary dictator wishing to establish power would not need to do anything so obviously sinister as banning the news: he or she would only have to see to it that the news organizations broadcast a flow of random-sounding bulletins, in great numbers but with little explanation of context, within an agenda that kept changing, without giving any sense of ongoing relevance of an issue that had seemed pressing only a short while before, the whole interspersed with constant updates about the colorful antics of murderers and film stars. This would be quite enough to undermine most people’s capacity to grasp political reality — as well as any resolve they might otherwise have summoned to alter it. The status quo could confidently remain forever undisturbed by a flood of, rather than a ban on, news.”
— “The opposite of facts is bias.”
— “The news may present itself as the authoritative portraitist of reality. It may claim to have an answer to the impossible question of what has really been going on, but it has no overarching ability to transcribe reality. It merely selectively fashions reality through the choices it makes about which stories to cast its spotlight on and which ones to leave out.”
— “For all their talk of education, modern societies neglect to examine by far the most influential means by which their populations are educated. Whatever happens in our classrooms, the more potent and ongoing kind of education takes place on the airwaves and on our screens.”
— “To consult the news is to raise a seashell to our ears and to be overpowered by the roar of humanity.”
— “…without regular contact with poetry, we may lose our vitality, cease to understand ourselves, neglect our powers of empathy or become unimaginative, brittle and sterile. Literature… is the medium that can reawaken us to the world.”
A manual on how to approach and handle the news whether you are at the giving or receiving end; a challenge for “journalists in a hurry” to turn to art; a masterclass in journalism and photojournalism, and of course — because this is Alain de Botton — life.
Our “Unnecessary Woman” is a Beiruti who spends a life reading and translating the works of non-Arabic literary giants into Arabic. What I find remarkable here is that her whole life and character is unfurled through the literary criticism of other works.
By the time a reader is done reading this book, they will have an infinite reading list.
No dizzying magic carpet rides from Rabih Alameddine this time, no shocking form-defying stunts of the novel, just an engaging and steady stream of thoughts and memories about Beirut and its place in the world, and mainly a life lived in literature.
This is a contemplation on such a life, on writers, on readers, on literature. But if we listen closely, it does not necessarily glorify this kind of life. Instead, it asks questions: “𝘎𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦, 𝘱𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘺, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘭𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘺 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘐 𝘥𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦?”
Our heroine is a flawed human being especially when it comes to human relations, and to read Alameddine is to learn to be patient with some details that make one uncomfortable — but does he teach you so many things! And to learn… isn’t that exactly why we read? Even when one of the things being taught indirectly is that tricky balance between literature and life.
Discovering a wonderful but obscure writer adds to my happiness these days. Although obscure only in my part of the world, at least… for after all, there is a public library in Paris named after Andrée Chedid!
Having shelves largely organized by geography, I had trouble categorizing an author of Lebanese descent, born in Cairo but resided in Paris and wrote in French, and has won French literary awards including the Albert Camus Prize and the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie in 2002.
Matters of roots often spring up in the novel. “𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘱 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘵𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘴𝘦𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘦𝘯𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘢𝘯, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘭, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵? 𝘉𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘴𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴, 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴, 𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦?”
But for the time being, I will keep her in my Lebanon section, because although she writes with the elegance of the French (there is even one sentence that is Proustian in length and spans an entire page), this book has the structure of a Lebanese novel — unconventional and unpredictable, and it is very much a reflection of Lebanon.
It ends as the civil war begins. Centered on the lives of a grandmother and granddaughter, we see their mirrored lives unfold while an unusual and refined suspense that drones throughout the delightful passages suddenly grips your whole being towards the end.
Andrée Chedid is a literary gem! I am wondering at the scarcity of her works in our bookshops!
At times when life outside of books becomes too overwhelming, I turn to pages that do not demand so much from me. Such books that are not lacking in depth are few.
For reading to be easy and yet remain in the company of a narrator who can tell good stories about people and places that interest me, I go back to Amin Maalouf.
His non-fiction are eye-openers, and his historical fiction fills history’s gaps with thrill and amusement. Among my favorite Lebanese writers, he is the only one who does not throw my brain and emotions into the fray and cradles it instead in snug storytelling while filling it with information.
Origins is not merely a family chronicle but a highly engaging memoir that reads like a novel. It is essential reading for those who wish to look into Levantine life and history more intimately, and learn life lessons from them regardless of nationality.
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, published in 1984, questioned and redrafted the prevalent narrative of who the world thought of as barbarians. The reader is made mindful that at the time of the Crusades, the Arab world, from Spain to Iraq, was the intellectual and material repository of the planet’s most advanced civilization, and it was only posterior to the Crusades that the trajectory of intellectual advancement and world history would shift to the West. More valuable is the epilogue where we are made to understand the repercussions and a seeming collective trauma nearly a thousand years later.
Samarkand is an entertaining read for any Persophile like myself. It is almost impossible to tell a story of Omar Khayyam without involving his contemporaries: Hassan-i Sabbah, founder of the Order of Assassins, and Nizam Al-Mulk, Persian history’s most famous vizier — the very first victim of the Assassins. Their destinies and of Persia’s are so entwined that it would also be impossible to discuss Persian history without touching on this legendary trio. Maalouf takes these characters and animates history with his seamless blending of fact and imagination.
The Rock of Tanios and Leo the African takes the reader on a journey through the vicissitudes of fate and empires.
I have just fingered the pages of Balthasar’s Odyssey and I cannot wait to see where it takes me!
On War — Barely a hundred years ago, Lebanese Christians readily proclaimed themselves Syrian, Syrians looked to Mecca for a king, Jews in the Holy Land called themselves Palestinian… none of the present-day Middle Eastern states existed, and even the term “Middle East” hadn’t been invented. The commonly used term was “Asian Turkey.” Since then, scores of people have died for allegedly eternal homelands, and many more will die tomorrow.
— War is aggression and pillage; it is destruction and carnage. But it is a crime for which we forgive kings, whereas we make children pay for it.
On Origins — …there is no need for us to know about our origins. Nor is there any need for our grand children to know anything about our lives. We each live through the years assigned to us and then go to our eternal sleep in the grave. Why bother to think about those who came before us, for they mean nothing to us? Why bother to think about those who will come after us, for we shall mean nothing to them?
But if everything is destined to sink into oblivion, why do we build anything, and why did our ancestors build anything? Why do we write anything, and why did they write anything? Why even bother to plant trees or have children? Why do we bother to fight for a cause, or speak of progress, change, humanity, and the future? By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.
