Shokoofeh Azar

#ReadAroundTheWorld. #Iran

“It's life's failure and its deficiencies that make someone a daydreamer. I don't understand why prophets and philosophers didn't see the significance in that. I think imagination is at the heart of reality, or at least, is the immediate definition and interpretation of reality.”

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is the first book translated from Farsi to be shortlisted for the International Booker award. It is written by Iranian author Shokoofeh Azah who fled to Australia as a refugee when her book was banned in her home country. The story is about a family from Razan whose lives are turned upside down after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The son Sohrab is taken prisoner and killed in the 1988 mass execution of thousands of Iranians due to their political affiliations. The mother Reza takes her grief to the top of the greengage tree and then wanders far from home in search of peace. The youngest daughter Bahar is burnt during a home invasion by militants and then becomes a ghost while her sister is transformed into a mermaid. There are strong elements of magical realism which draw on traditional Persian and Zoroastrian mythology and tales.

There are many perspicacious comments about the political situation: “The people were left wondering how they’d ended up in a game whose rules they hadn’t written. The game of victim and aggressor. A game in which it didn’t take long for the victims to become the aggressors.”

I found this book beautiful and insightful but difficult to follow. I have read books with elements of magical realism but this novel lent heavily on this style which possibly as a Western reader is hard to adapt to. I would be interested to see what she writes next. 3.5 stars for me.… (mais)

This is a remarkable novel about a family during and after the Iranian Revolution, but told in a magical realism style that often makes it difficult to know exactly what is happening. One has to suspend logic, and instead ride the waves of myth, magic, and metaphor. The story is narrated by the ghost of thirteen-year-old Bahar, who has the ability to make herself visible to her family and intervene on their behalf.

When the Revolution begins, Bahar and her family were wealthy intellectuals who lived in a beautiful home. After a tragic attack, the family moves to a very remote village where the mullahs have little sway at first. But even here they cannot escape the effects of fundamentalism, war, and sorrow. Ghosts, mermaids, black snows, jinns, and wildly growing plants symbolize various emotional tolls that the Revolution has taken. Only at the very end of the book do we learn what really happened to the mother and sister, Beeta.

I found the author's ruminations on death to be interesting. At one point Bahar says,

...I'd made a mistake. I had been wrong to think that death only marked the end of some things. No! Death was the end of everything. The end of my body, my identity, my credibility. The end of everything that had meant something to me in life: family, love, trust, friendship. Yes...death was the end of all these things.

A fellow ghost comments, "Death hasn't made humans any happier."

I also enjoyed the passages about the importance of books. Although the Revolutionary Guards had burned most of their books, they slowly collect more, and later Bahar's father returns to his family home which still has a large collection.

Every book he touched was more than a book. It was a memory. His entire destiny. It was longing.

Another interesting metaphor is the River of Oblivion. An entire village falls into a deep sleep, because "sorrow brings oblivion." The being responsible for the stupor says, "I'm not the one who goes after people, it is always the people who come after me." When reality becomes too overwhelming, oblivion is the escape, but resolves nothing. When Bahar's father eventually returns to Tehran, he is forced to confront reality and to analyze his own role in allowing the mullahs to take over the country.

He bought the newspaper every day, and though he knew that much of it was devoid of truth, he wanted to know what had become of the rest of the population while he had been away—after the war, after the mass executions, after the flight of the educated and wealthy from the country. He still didn't have the courage to leave the house, to walk among people in the streets who, either through their silence of their ignorance, had practically killed others to take their places. He still couldn't forgive: not others, and not himself.

Although not always an easy book to read, [The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree] is an interesting way to look at the Iranian Revolution and its effects. When the world goes crazy, magic realism doesn't seem so farfetched.… (mais)

I picked this up because of the gorgeous cover and because the premise of a story of magical realism but set in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran seemed too good to pass on.

Having finished, the book, I really am not sure what to make of it. I certainly did not enjoy it. However, how can anyone enjoy a book that reads like a long list of atrocities committed against people who should be be neighbours and friends. How can one enjoy a book that cannot give credit to the translator because listing their name would put them in mortal danger? How can one enjoy a book that, despite it’s colourful cover, is nothing but bleak and full of hopelessness and despair?

Still, I had some issues with the writing also: I liked how the author intertwined folklore and magical elements with a straight narrative in this story. I liked how we get to follow our narrator and Khomeini (at least for a while). However, this change of POV also made the book feel disjointed. At the same time, I am not sure I could have actually read much of the book if it had not been for the magical elements because, as I said, it just reads like a never-ending list of torture and killings. And while I understand that this is kind of the point of the book, I would rather turn to non-fiction for this. I need something else from fiction. Something that leaves room for imagination. Something that makes me want to find out more. Not something that makes me want to put the book down and move on wishing I had not read it.

So, while I understand that this is in a way an important book because it strives to tell of the living and dying conditions in Iran after 1988, including the mass killings and religious persecutions leading to tortures and … more killings, and while I understand that the book itself is also a huge middle finger raised towards the current Iranian regime, I felt left out as a reader. There was little in the book that I could connect with as someone who has no links to the history and people of Iran. And once the major twist in the story was revealed (not much of a twist as I expected the revelation somehow – without it, the POV would not have made sense), there was just little to keep me reading. And while I finished the book, I feel like a vould and perhaps should have abandoned it much earlier because there was not much more in the way of story development that was added after the “big reveal”.… (mais)