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| Title : |
Censoring an Iranian Love Story |
| ISBN : |
9781408701607 |
| Author : |
Shahriar Mandanipour |
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| Size : |
- * - * - |
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| Price : |
0.0 |
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| Content briefing |
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| Censoring An Iranian Love Story, by Shahriah Mandanipour, one of Iran’s most distinguished and controversial contemporary writers, is an astoundingly inventive work of fiction that depicts life, love and literature in modern Iran. The novel is composed of two intertwined narratives, one featuring a novelist named Shahriar, the author’s fictional alter ego who has attempted for years to publish his books, only to be thwarted by the omnipotent and malevolent censor at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance he ironically nicknames Porfiry Petrovich (the merciless magistrate investigating murders in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment). He sets out to write a bewitching love story in the timeless Persian tradition, yet modest and pious enough to please his pitiless censor. The love story, which unfolds as a sub-narrative within the novel, features the beautiful, black-haired Sara, and the passionate, proud Dara, named after pre-revolutionary Iranian children’s book characters. Sara is the book-loving teenage daughter of cautious middle-class parents, while the twenty-something Dara comes from a poor family and has spent time in jail for watching and selling forbidden foreign movies (masterpieces only). Despite their disapproving parents, the couple pass secret messages to each other encoded in the pages of their favorite books, and clandestinely meet in Tehran’s busy streets, internet cafes, lush gardens, and even hospital emergency rooms, anywhere they can avoid the watchful eyes of the Campaign against Social Corruption patrols. Yet the author knows that writing freely of Sara and Dara’s meetings and of their growing desire for each other will prevent the book from ever being published, and he strikes out entire’s passages in anticipation of his censor’s objections, and debates throughout the book with his censor to justify his story. The result is an ingenious and surprising novel, provocative, ironic, wholly compelling and entirely unforgettable. |
| Introduction of author |
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| Shahriar Mandanipour has won numerous awards for his novels, short stories and non-fiction in Iran, although he was unable to publish his fiction there from 1992 to 1997 as a result of censorship. A noted film critic in Iran, he was the editor in chief of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening). He is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University and Censoring an Iranian Love Story is his first full-length work in English. |
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