Short stories
Fear and Trembling
ترس و لرز
Gholam-Hossein Saedi · 1968
Synopsis
Six linked stories set in a fishing village on the coast of the Persian Gulf, where the sea, the sky, the sun and the moon seem charged with menace. The villagers live in fear of hunger and tremble at the thought of drowning; nameless dreads prowl their paths, and each story brings the village a new anxiety, from the sea or from outside, that disturbs an already precarious peace.
Context
The collection appeared in Tehran in 1968 and came out of an investigation: in 1965, the author had travelled through the villages of the southern coast and drawn from it a monograph on those possessed by the wind, Ahl-e hava, whose stories take up the material and even the turns of phrase. The coast appears there as isolated from the rest of the country and marked by beliefs from Africa, India and Arabia. Its English translator read beneath this distant setting a warning against docile submission to the clergy and surrender to the West. Minoo Southgate put it into English in 1984, Felicetta Ferraro into Italian.
Who it is for
Six linked stories in Persian, a slim volume. It is worth knowing that the stories read as allegories, and that politics hides in them behind a distant setting.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the major works of its author, and among the first Persian texts in which critics have noted traces of magical realism.