Sadegh Hedayat, although not a name you will most likely hear in western literature, is nevertheless one of the most prominent writers from Iran. In my last novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, Hedayat’s was mentioned more than once in a series of names that Azar repeatedly honored in her exuberant novel. ‘The Blind Owl’ which is considered a classic work of literature of not only Iran but of literature as a whole, was mentioned in the couple of lists I visited, one of which was from Lithub, for selecting which books to read for the month of March.
While I was a gay person throughout this month, reading one fulfilling novel after another from the Iranian Literature, this last book of March, a month already passed by, was mostly an experience of mixed feelings.
Staring on the positive side, respectfully, I would say that Hedayat’s novella definitely reads like a classic. There’s a certain arrestness to his prose which grips you in its exquisitely written sentences, and therein, you visualize the neatly told, if however bleak, images that Hedayat paints with his well-picked words. While the prose, with very detailed and well incorporated domestic words, does a great job of telling a story with a continuing lure to it, the story itself is a really odd one.
Eerie, and almost gothic, the story begins with a man, a pen-case decorator, narrating his life, a man whose age changes throughout the novel, sometimes across passages sometimes rather instantly. At the start of the novel, he talks about having seen a lady with deep black and rather drowning eyes across an old man, like an Indian fakir, towards whom this lady stretches her hand. It is those deep black eyes that bothering our protagonist as the novel starts; with a few pages in, however, he receives a visitor, that same lady, at his rather crackly house. As she enters, she quickly moves towards the bed and lies on there – and then goes cold.
I shouldn’t risk giving away more spoilers, for what I’ve written might have already intrigued you, but I should however give away my second half of the mixed feelings: the unsettling and irritating feelings. With a snippet of what kind of story one can expect and my praise for Hedayat’s gripping prose, I found this short novella a blend of Kafka’s bleak storylines and Kundera’s rather creeping prose that gets under your skin – a blend that sounds great on paper, yet reads rather disturbingly within lines.
There are certain things that keeps repeating in this novella: index finger of the left hand, weird laughters, one’s shadow on the wall, lucid dreams, death and afterlife, murder, and a narrative of self-pity and disgust. The snippet above, though intriguing, is nothing when compared to the story that follows: it seems like a work of a dejected man, one who has suffered incredibly, and can only now think in dark senses… Yet there’s no clear storyline that should connect this novella, from its opening events to what follows and to where it ends.
With its lucid plots, gothic events, repeating
quirks, and no coherent storylines, reading Hedayat’s classic can become irritating
– for it reads a like mystery which wasn’t even understood by its thinker or its
receiver.
Ratings: 4/5 **** April 3, 2021_