One of my highlighted books from 2019 was Baqer Moin’s biography of Khomeini, ‘Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah’. As a Shia Muslim, I had always been intrigued with Khomeini, for he was presented as either the recent imam or savior of Shia‘at, or a cruel dictator. And to answer to my intrigue, I decided to know him personally since the accounts of his deeds which I heard were always polarized. While some, as I mentioned, saw him as the savior of Shia religion or even Islam as a whole, others thought of him as a merciless dictator.
Moin’s biopic of Khomeini was great because it succeeded in presenting Khomeini as a human being: his childhood, adolescent, education, youth, political struggle, the revolution, the aftermath of revolution, and much more. Within such a comprehensive biography of Khomeini, which took Baqer almost ten years to complete, I came to know not only the man who brought the Islamic Revolution, but also the man who was once a child, who lived a very simple life, had small everyday issues, and like every patriot, really wanted to showcase his love either for his country or his religion.
After reading that book, I not only sympathized with the cheerers of Khomeini, but most importantly, understood the reason behind their cheering. Azar’s novel has done something profoundly opposite for me: now I understand, also, those who condemn Khomeini of cruelty and dictatorship. Yet it is with such a polarized understanding of the man and his revolution that I am able to find the truth: which, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.
Azar’s novel is a story of, probably, the most tragic family that ever existed in the fiction world; definitely the most tragic one from I have read so far. Bahar, a thirteen-year-old girl, narrates the story of her family, where she has an elder sister Beeta, and elder brother Sohrab, and their in-love parents, her father Hushang and her mother Roza. The era is post 1979; the Islamic revolution is here, and the Shah has been overthrown. Yet the result isn’t much different: before, the Iranian lived a life of forced modernity and inequality, now they live a life of forced Islamism and isolation from the outside world.
Much like one of communist manifestos, the Revolutionary Guards are ordered to kill those who, even in very mild ways, have been opposed to the revolution – that is if they own any content, books, CDs, posters, that are threat to their revolution. The number of people they kill is horrendous. But the joke is on them, because in Azar’s novel the dead continue to exist as ghosts and jinns even after their death and can interact with the living world.
This combination is what makes Azar’s novel a masterpiece for me: while on one hand this novel is a truly heartbreaking story of individual and collective grief, on the other it is a spellbinding work of extraordinary imagination where the ancient mythical stories of Iran come alive. The latter helps convey, rather beautifully, the otherwise unbearable weight of the grief the former has to tell.
Azar’s debut novel has the quality, ingenuity, and domestic language that Roy’s first novel ‘The God of small things’ had, and moreover, it possesses Rushdie-like power of the extraordinary imagination and the prose to bring that imagination to life on the paper.
Sharp is Azar’s retelling of the horrific post 1979 accounts, and beautifully lush is her imagination and prose. Together, they combine, where the latter softens the sharpness of the prior with its consolation, to tell a story that’s as memorable as it is important.
Ratings: 5/5 ***** March 25, 2021_