Women Without Men

 

Women Without Men / Shahrnush Parsipur
trans. from the Persian by Faridoun Farrokh
NY: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2012, c1989.
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.

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

 

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree / Shokoofeh Azar
trans. from the Farsi by ?
NY: Europa, 2020, c2017.
256 p.

This read is one I've been meaning to get to for a while. It's the story of Iran through decades of governmental change and repression, from the 1979 Iranian revolution to recent years. 

But it's also the story of one family and their tragic encounters with politics and religion in this totalitarian state. Reviews note that this book is told in a magical realism style, influenced by Persian storytelling traditions and newer writers like Marquez. This can be a good thing if you like it, and a stumbling block to the story if you don't.

I fall somewhere in between. While I generally like imaginative styles I don't think I was in the right mood for it here. I read the whole book carefully; I appreciated the family stories and the way they are bookish and cultured in the face of fanaticism. I found quite a lot to enjoy. But the endless interlinked, nested stories and the constant flights of fancy tired me out a little.  

Nevertheless, this is an interesting read. Full of tragedy and awful events, it still has a lyrical style and approach to it all. It ties together ancient Iranian history (a group of Zoroastrian ghosts in their Razan home, for example) with modern, and shows it as a constant line. That was really effective and gives the sense of Iran as an ancient place that is only currently suffering from the dictatorship in power now. 

The story is narrated by 13 year old Bahar, who we soon learn is a ghost. She was murdered in a revolutionary attack on her father's house and his musical instruments. As someone in the world of the dead, she has a kind of omniscience that the others don't. And she can tell the stories of her older brother Sohrab, arrested and executed; the story of her mother who leaves home to wander for many years, her sister Beeta who is changed into a mermaid, and her father, who leaves the tragic surroundings of the home in rural Razan where they'd moved to avoid political unrest in order to return to Tehran when his family has scattered. 

Their stories are unlikely, infused with djinns, mermaids, spirits, and other mystical creatures and events. There are side characters who appear after their stories are told; and those who reappear in the village, broken loose from the Iranian past by becoming a modern, violent, absolutist soldier. 

This book certainly gives a strong feel for the Iranian social climate, and the way oppression kills the imagination as much as it does actual lives. It feels like this book is a reclamation of that wild imagination that is the heritage of Iranians. I liked it but I don't know enough about Iranian history (or legends) to tell what is real and what is imagined, so it was a harder reading experience for me in that way. 

Disoriental

Disoriental / Negar Djavadi; translated from the French by Tina A. Kover
New York, N.Y. : Europa Editions, 2018
338 p.

This is one of the best books I've read this year. And since I have been recommending it to everyone I know, I thought I'd better share my thoughts here as well. 

The narrator is Kimia Sadr, who fled Iran at age 10 with her family due to her parents' political outspokenness and opposition to the Islamic regime. The family ends up in France; why, when, and how we only find out slowly, as Kimia tells the story in retrospect, flipping between present and past at will.

As the book opens, Kimia is waiting alone in a fertility clinic waiting room for the results of her recent visits. As she waits, she shares her thoughts - about her fertility doctor, about the process she's taken to get there, and then suddenly back to her great-grandfather in the province of Mazandaran, and to the birth of her grandmother, Nour. These beginnings are almost folkloric, with the harem and their superstitions around Nour's birth and the very elaborate, beautiful setting. This family background keeps getting fleshed out, all the way to the births and then marriage of Kimia's parents.

These family stories keep flashing back and forth during the first part of the book. The rapidity with which Kimia switches streams reflects the way memories work, and sounds so much like someone just telling family stories, the way they get interrupted or redirected by a comment, or how the teller just starts going off on a tangent. 

In the second part of the book, it shifts a little more from the Sadr family history in Iran to their recent past in France. We learn more about Kimia herself, and what the defining moments of her nuclear family history really are. There's a sense of the narrative almost getting to a point that you're expecting then backing off - and when you protest, the narrator saying, yes, yes, I'm getting to that, and continuing on. It's a fairly long book but read so quickly for me. The family stories are rich with atmosphere and history, told in a captivating style. And Kimia herself is an opinionated, sarcastic, honest and complex storyteller. 

There are themes of identity - national and personal, of being true to one's self and beliefs, of politics and its effect on daily life, and all sorts of other elements that come together in this story of a strong woman who survives a turbulent youth and ends up happy. There is a real exploration of what it means to be family, to be relations, siblings, parent & child.  It was thoroughly entertaining, illuminating, and educational in all the best ways. It's a very adult book, in the sense that it never takes the easy way out, and is comfortable in its own messy complexity. 

Definitely a top read of the year. Go find it!