Novel
روزگار دوزخی آقای ایاز
Not translated into English
Reza Baraheni · 1970
Synopsis
Ayyâz, a slave who has become the favourite of Sultan Mahmoud, speaks. The book opens on a torture: before the crowd that has come to watch, the limbs of a man named Mansour are sawn off one by one. Between the scenes of power and flesh in the palace, where the queen mother draws the young man onto her couch amid gardens and prayers, the narrator returns to his own life, to his family and to the way he came into the sultan's service; through him, it is a whole people that power forces onto its belly, and centuries of Iranian history that fold back on themselves.
Context
Completed around 1970, the novel was entrusted to the publisher Amir Kabir and printed, but never put on sale: alarmed by its scenes of violence and sex, the publisher sent the sheets to be pulped. Since then the Persian text has circulated only in clandestine copies and has never been reissued. Excerpts appeared in English in the United States in the seventies; the French translation by Katayoun Shahpar-Rad, published by Pauvert in 2000, was its first public edition. Christophe Balaÿ saw in it a sort of apocalypse of the imperial decade.
Who it is for
A big novel, more than four hundred pages in French, written in a single breath. It is worth knowing that the scenes of torture and sex in it are very explicit.
Prizes and reception
Chosen by a poll on the Vinesh site among the twenty best Persian narratives; regarded in France as a major novel of Persian prose.