50books_poc | Entries tagged with iranian

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

11. Selected Poems by Mimi Khalvati is a selection from three previous books, which I enjoyed cos, although her poetry tends to be allusive (and so I missed some of the meaning), Khalvati's use of language is like listening to music. Two example poems, which I found particularly pleasing for various reasons, at my dw journal.

Disclaimer (also for the tag wranglers): I have no idea whether Mimi Khalvati herself, whose online autobiography is sparse, would identify as non-white and/or Iranian (or how the word "Persian" might or might not be a label of choice for some ex-pat Iranians). She certainly writes about non-Eurocentric concerns.

12. Startling the Flying Fish by Grace Nichols is a sequence of poems about Caribbean life and history. For me every word was powerful. It's outstandingly the best contemporary poetry I've read for years. The blurb perfectly describes this work as "symphonic". I wasn't sure whether to post an example poem or not because, even though all these poems are excellent as stand-alones, they belong in the context of the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts (but I caved anyway and posted two examples on my dw journal). If you're interested in contemporary poetry or the Caribbean then you should read this book. I strongly recommend it. Nichols is an author with plenty of published work too so if you like this then there's plenty more (and she writes for children too).

Tags: women writers, poetry, iran, britain, british-iranian, iranian, guyanese, british, guyanese-british, african-caribbean, british-african-caribbean, black british, caribbean

zeborah

Explores the rapidly changing eras of Iran's recent history through the eyes of one family. I never quite kept up with all the relationships between the characters, but still felt like I knew them. The prose is beautiful and deceptively simple; often much meaning is packed in an allusion and a silence. (As in the beginnings of a love affair where so little was explained in the characters' speech that a previous reader had pencilled in a question about this elision. I love marginalia, so pencilled in an answer: the trick was in applying the poetry under discussion as a metaphor to their relationship.)

A few tropes were a little cliched (skip spoiler - eg the death of the disabled boy by stumbling innocently into a political murder) so less effective than they could have been; but I had tears in my eyes more than once at the various dilemmas and difficulties faced by the main characters. The ending rang of autobiography, but I couldn't figure out whether that detracted from the fiction or added to the realism.

alankria.livejournal.com

I'm way behind on posting here and, for various reasons, all but one of the following books are currently not in my possession - so these are pretty short reviews.

4. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Paper

The back made it sound wonderful: a scribe in central Asia searching for the perfect paper, while his town's location at a crossroads of travel and politics impacts upon his life. While it is about that, the execution is not as good as I'd hoped. A lot of time is given over to the Scribe's unhappy musings about his life and how he's just not capable of writing the perfect book. Events unfold sometimes slowly, sometimes offstage, with the overall effect of not particularly gripping me. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani's language is lovely in places and some of the characters are interesting, but I felt like the novel isn't quite as focused as it could have been: it muses, it tells, but it doesn't quite work. Certainly interesting, though, and I intend to re-read it sometime because I suspect there are layers to be found. Also there's a chronology of paper-related history at the back which is marvellous.

5. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo & Erlinda Enriquez Panlilio, eds. Why I Travel and other essays by fourteen women

Now this was a find! It's a collection of travel essays by Filipina, with a section focusing on local destinations and another on international ones. A small section at the back considers the how of travel in particular; one my favourite essays is here, concerning how a wheelchair-bound woman has discovered that she shouldn't feel too limited by her situation, and she tells all about her adventures in a Moroccan souk on donkey-back and other experiences around the world, where the help of a few people has resulted in her having a fantastic time. The essays sometimes describe the places visited, sometimes dwell on personal history in that places (especially in the local section), and are almost all engaging and interesting.

6. Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing

A collection of short stories by a Thai author. This means, crucially, that you're getting stories about Thailand as a complex and real place, not the magical land of golden temples and hookers often described by farang writers. Rattawut is concerned with the regular Thai person, not particularly wealthy, often in a perpetual balancing act just above poverty. He writes about a young boy's relationship with a Cambodian refugee whose now-dead father put all their wealth in her gold teeth; he writes about a young man whose mother is on the verge of going blind; he writes about a teenaged girl whose poor father is losing his cockfights to a rich bully, and the various consequences this has on their family; he writes about a wealthy teenaged boy dodging the draft while his poorer friend cannot; and so on. In some stories, the plot itself is not particularly innovative. The entire emotional arc of the draft-dodging story was predictable, for instance. But the way Rattawut writes allows you to really get into his characters' heads and understand their various decisions, so they are not distant or simple stories, and the Thailand he writes about is a difficult, interesting, complicated place. Definitely recommended, especially for readers of realist fiction or those interested in Thailand/SE Asia as depicted by a local.

7. Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

Oh, My Name is Red, I did want to adore you. Those long beautiful passages on the nature of art and miniaturism and history are, in my opinion, worth the price of admission alone. (Especially if you, uh, got it for cheaps at an Indian pavement book stall.) Yet the characters are almost all un-captivating and parts of the plot progress strangely. A character is tortured and, within pages of the torture ending, decides that the man who gave the order is going to be his new mentor and father figure, and Pamuk spends the rest of the book telling us that they have a deep and meaningful bond. We're told a lot about characterisation in this book. I enjoyed reading about historic Istanbul (and I can't imagine the city under snow!) and, as I said, his tangents were divine, and parts of the murder plot were pretty interesting. Overall, though, a bit of a flawed package.

8. Githa Hariharan, When Dreams Travel

A novel about storytelling and storytellers, especially female, typically powerless ones. Hariharan takes the myth of Shahrzad and begins after it ended, with her sister Dunyazad returning to Shahrzad's palace to help her husband construct her tomb. Echoes of the Taj Mahal in its vast splendour and the Sultan's obsession and the consequences. Dunyazad and a scheming maidservant with a peculiarly hairy mole meet and share stories, including many of a hair-covered woman who was eventually ostracised by her community -- revolving around the possibility that Shahrzad escaped and they can too, from the entrapments of the old 1001 Night story and the present concerns of their lives. When Dreams Travel is a curious, meandering book, beautifully written.

puritybrown.livejournal.com

33: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley

The sixth and final instalment of the Scott Pilgrim series is just as deliriously funny and clever as the first five, but with an added zing of metafictional deconstruction: turns out, the fact that Scott is a ditzy, self-centred manchild is not an oversight on O'Malley's part. It's the point, and the manner in which this fact is examined and played with and explained and overturned in this climactic volume is an utter delight. Marvellous.

34: Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi

In which a man decides to die, and does so, over eight days, while his wife and brother and children try to persuade him to live. This is good work which I enjoyed, up to a point, but I can't help comparing it to Satrapi's Persepolis and Embroideries, and I don't think it comes off well in the comparison. Although the storytelling and characterisation and observation are as thoughtful and well-executed as before, the art seems a little less polished, not quite as assured. It's always attractive and it never interferes with the story, but it's not as good a standard as I know Satrapi is capable of, which is disappointing.

35: Love Water by Venio Tachibana (with illustrations by Tooko Miyagi)

This is a BL/yaoi novel from Juné Manga's light novel line. To be honest, I've read quite a few of the novels from that line, and I only wrote up the first two I read for this comm. The others I passed by because they were so inconsequential and generic (when they weren't offensive) that I couldn't be bothered writing about them. Love Water is written to a rather higher standard. It's not a genre-transcender by any means -- if you don't like romance novels or BL in particular, Love Water's not likely to change your mind. But as an example of the genre, I found it very effective; atmospheric and emotionally intense, with gorgeous illustrations and a plot that made sense; and it's a lot better-written than most. (And better translated, too, though there are a few irritating glitches -- I suspect that the love interest's "flocked coat" is actually a frock coat. Easy mistake to make if you're not well up on 19th-century European men's fashions.)

I actually kind of want to gush like an overexcited teenager about this novel, because I loved it. But I will restrain myself! I will just say that it is about a beautiful young man who works in a brothel (but not as a prostitute) in Meiji-era Osaka and falls in love with a rich and handsome young entrepreneur; and if you like this sort of thing, this is very much the sort of thing you'll like.

seekingferret.livejournal.com

46) The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr

This is a survey of Shia history, culture, and politics by an Iranian-American academic. Nasr has several big theses: That Shia states would make a better ally for the West in the Middle East than Sunni states, that the Shia world is experiencing a revival of identity and culture as it challenges Sunni domination, but all are overshadowed by one primary theme: The West has historically done a poor job of understanding Shiism, and this needs to change fast.

I found I was mostly reading it as a vocabulary book, because it was stunning to me how words whose Western meaning I understand well hold totally different valences when you understand the history of Shiism and Sunnism in the Middle East. Words like 'democracy' or 'freedom' don't mean what I thought they meant. I feel like I've been having conversations for the past ten years where everyone was talking at crosspurposes, and I'm just now realizing.

Taking democracy as an example, some Shiite clerics have spent the past century positioning what I would term Islamic theocracy (velāyat-e faqīh) as the true democracy, because Islamic law is the true representation of the will of the people. This is by no means the only definition of democracy in circulation that Nasr shows, but Nasr vividly illustrates how this definition, which didn't originate with Khomeini but which he perhaps most prominently brought to the fore, influences even the most Western-minded Middle Easterners' understanding of the concept.

After brief but important discussion of the origins of Shiism and its historical touchstones (important because Nasr continually makes callbacks to these touchstones, showing how memories of Ali and Umar, memories of the Safavids and the Ottomans, continually influences the conversation in the Middle East in a similar way to how references to the Framers constantly influence American ideology and politics), Nasr spends most of the book on the political landscape of the past 30 years, essentially from the Iranian Revolution to today, showing how a major theme in the Middle Eastern political scene has been Shiites discovering a voice and learning how to use it. He spends a lot of time on the Iraq war, naturally given the book's publication in 2006, and the framework he has laid for understanding the war's Shia/Sunni dynamic in previous chapters makes his sections on the Iraq War incredibly potent. For me it was a string of sudden realizations, moments of shock when my past understanding of a concept combined with some new premise about Shia/Sunni politics to generate a new, deeper and more complicated vision of the war.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

40. Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror

A non-fiction pop book dealing with a wide range of subjects, from the history of the state of Israel, to the difference between Islamist groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Jihadist groups like al-Qa'ida (as well as the inaccuracy of referring to al-Qa'ida as any kind of unified group), to historical examples of other 'cosmic wars' such as the Crusades or the Zealot rebellions of the Roman Empire, to the history of Fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, to others. He doesn't always tie these many, many topics together as tightly as one might wish, but if you look at the book as a smorgasbord of various information about the "war on terror", it's a pretty awesome book.

One of my favorite things about Aslan is that he's a much more lyrical, thoughtful writer than I tend to expect from pop non-fiction. Let me quote a paragraph at you: "When I close my eyes, I see white. Strange how synesthetic memory can be. I am certain the insular town of Enid, Oklahoma, where my family alighted three decades ago, was chockablock with buildings, homes, churches, parks. And surely other seasons came and went in the stretch of time we lived there, months when the city's empty streets were not blanketed in snow and the sky did not rumble with dark and silvery clouds. But I remember none of that. Only the clean, all-encompassing whiteness of Enid, Oklahoma, snow as it heaped on the sidewalks, perched on the trees, and settled evenly over the glassy lake." See? How can you not be willing to spend a couple of hundred pages with the man, even if he wasn't telling you fascinating, important things.

Overall, I think I prefer Aslan's other book, No God But God, to this one, but for a broad summary of many things relating to modern Middle Eastern politics and the American response, this book is great.

Current Mood: cheerful

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

30. Reza Aslan, No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

I adored this book. It's a non-fiction book detailing Islam as a religion; about half of it is devoted to an incredibly detailed description of life and culture in the Arabian peninsula immediately before and during Mohammad's life. The second half of the book lays out some of the most prominent evolutions of Islam since then, from the basic branches of Sunni, Shia, and Sufism, to more recent developments like Iran's Khomeinism to Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism.

This book was fantastic. It's perfect both for the reader who knows nothing about Islam and the educated reader. It contains so many details and interesting perspectives that I think there's something new for everyone to learn*, and yet it lays things out so clearly that it's also a great introduction. Aslan is a wonderful writer; despite it being a non-fiction book, it has a very conversational tone, which is totally engaging and enthralling. I have not read many non-fiction books that have sucked me in like this one.

Very, very highly recommended, and I'll be checking out Aslan's other book.

In particular, I spent a lot of time shrieking "Oh my God! Did you know this?!" during the section about Britain's role in the formation of Saudi Arabia.

Current Mood: sleepy

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

After Satrapi leaves Iran at the end of Persepolis 1, she begins a new life in Vienna as an immigrant alone in a foreign land. This is a more familiar story, at least to me, than that of growing up during and after a revolution. But not only is it just as witty and well-observed and poignant as the first book, this one too is full of the sort of surprising turns that a real life takes, even without a revolution.

I don’t want to give away too much of the story. But I have to mention the moment when punk teenage Satrapi is huddled nervously on a couch at a party when she hears sex moans from another room: “Ah! Ah! Ah!” Freaking out, she grabs a book to distract herself, but she can read nothing on its pages but “Ah! Ah! Ah!”

Satrapi’s very solid relationship with her family is even more central to this book, where they are largely separated, than in the last one where they lived together. Despite her encounters with racism, loneliness, political oppression, and, eventually, a complete emotional breakdown, that gives this coming of age story a reassuring overlay: with a family like that, she’s sure to find herself eventually.

Recommended.

See it on Amazon: Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Both parts together: The Complete Persepolis

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A memoir in graphic novel form about growing up in Iran during the revolution.

I avoided reading this for a long time because I had the impression that it was one of those worthy, educational, depressing books which are read more for their medicinal benefit than for enjoyment. (Perhaps because reviews often began "This is a very important book.") Those are certainly valuable and necessary, but not often to my personal taste.

I had somehow missed any mention of the fact that Persepolis is extremely funny as well as dark, and not earnestly improving at all. It’s actually in a completely different tradition, that of the memoir of two brutal experiences – war and the less-than-happy childhood – which often inspire black comedy. The other thing I didn’t expect was an odd bit of personal resonance: both Satrapi and I come from Communist families. I only wish that, like her, I had been given comic books on dialectical materialism.

The deceptively simple art meshes with the deceptively simple writing to create a perfect recreation of her child’s eye view, to which she and we bring our own adult perspective. Very funny, very dark, precisely observed, poignant, and witty. I couldn’t stop reading this, and I highly recommend it.

kizmet-42.livejournal.com

I don't remember reading an unfavorable review on this community, but here's one.

In the Walled Garden is probably considered to be "literary" which may be why I found it boring. The plot - what I could find of it, I gave up five chapters in - seems to center around a childhood love hindered by class issues, and the arrest of other characters prior to the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in the late 1970s in Iran. The characters didn't interest me, the story didn't compel me to finish.

Can't recommend this one.