Thus we read not just the scenes Shahriar has written but also the sentences and words he’s crossed out or merely imagined, knowing they can never be published.
Yet writing freely of Sara and Dara’s encounters, their desires, would put Shahriar in as much peril as his lovers. Defying the state and their disapproving parents, they meet in secret amid the bustling streets, Internet cafés, and lush private gardens of Tehran. But Iran’s Campaign Against Social Corruption forbids their being alone together. It may be his greatest challenge yet.īeautiful black-haired Sara and fiercely proud Dara fall in love in the dusty stacks of the library, where they pass secret messages to each other encoded in the pages of their favorite books. Now, on the threshold of fifty, tired of writing dark and bitter stories, he has come to realize that the “world around us has enough death and destruction and sorrow.” He sets out instead to write a bewitching love story, one set in present-day Iran.
A writer named Shahriar-the author’s fictional alter ego-has struggled for years against the all-powerful censor at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The novel entwines two equally powerful narratives. Kudos to Khalili for a wonderfully fluid translation of an intricately layered text.From one of Iran’s most acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers, his first novel to appear in English-a dazzlingly inventive work of fiction that opens a revelatory window onto what it’s like to live, to love, and to be an artist in today’s Iran. All the while, the writer converses with his censor, his characters, the reader and himself to create an intriguing postmodern, multifaceted romance steeped in Iranian culture. As the couple’s love grows, the self-censoring writer strikes out whole passages in anticipation of his censor’s objections. Shahriar’s work in progress, which unfolds as a subnarrative within the novel, concerns Dara and Sara, teenagers named after prerevolutionary Iranian children’s book characters, as they explore sexual and emotional love in a nation that forbids physical or social interaction between young people of the opposite sex.
As a professional writer, narrator Shahriar has known his censor, nicknamed Pofiry Petrovich, for long enough that he can anticipate his objections. The first of Mandanipour’s novels to appear in English follows an ambitious but censored Iranian writer as he attempts to write a Nobel-caliber love story that will pass the censors’ inspection.
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