Women Without Men

 

Women Without Men / Shahrnush Parsipur
trans. from the Persian by Faridoun Farrokh
NY: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2012, c1973.
192 p.

I picked up this book thanks to the International Booker - a new 2026 edition was on the longlist, and then I found this 2012 edition, and discovered it was first published in 1989. So the subtitle, "a novel of Modern Iran" has to be taken in context. 

It's a tale of a group of five women who all face extreme misogyny in their homes, their towns, their entire setting. So they decide to leave, and all end up in the same place, walking the road to Tehran but finding a place to stay on the outskirts, in the home and garden of one lone woman. They have different roles and different experiences; one is happy to settle in with another man, the gardener, one keeps house, one decides to plant herself and turn into a tree. This is definitely the most unexpected part of the story, and it was a little bit of random magical realism for me -- but looking into the role of trees in Iran, they are one of the oldest cultures to treat trees as sacred beings. So I'm sure that once again I am missing many of the context clues to the deeper meanings in this story. 

In any case, many readers might be familiar with this book because of its Booker nomination, well, at least passingly familiar. I thought it was interesting but unfortunately didn't get drawn in completely. The characters were a bit too sketched out for me, I couldn't quite understand how they fit together in their new setting, and the ending was both unexpected and a bit unsatisfying. So I'm glad I read it but it was a bit difficult, and I think I'd need to study it a bit more closely to really get a lot out of it.