Novel
Touba and the Meaning of Night
طوبی و معنای شب
Shahrnoush Parsipour · 1988
Synopsis
In Tehran, at the end of the nineteenth century, Touba, daughter of the scholar Haji Adib, learns to read from her father, a rare thing for a girl, and from a very young age searches for God and truth. Two years after her father's death, at fourteen, she offers herself in marriage to a fifty-two-year-old cousin who manages the family's property; the union ends in divorce, and she then marries a Qajar prince. Around her house pass the Constitutional Revolution, the Pahlavis, the coup of 1953 and the years leading to 1979, and the marvellous settles in as if it were a matter of course.
Context
The book appeared in Tehran from Esperak at the beginning of 1367 in the Persian calendar, that is, in spring 1988, and was reprinted several times in its first year; it was afterwards long denied reissue in Iran. It has been read as one of the first Persian examples of magical realism, nourished by the mystical parables of Suhrawardi, and as a break with the socialist realism of before the revolution. Havva Houshmand and Kamran Talattof put it into English in 2006, for the Feminist Press of New York; it does not exist in French.
Who it is for
A sweeping novel in Persian, following a life from childhood to old age. It helps to know that the marvellous is treated like everything else, with nothing to mark the passage from one to the other.
Prizes and reception
Hailed as a milestone of Persian prose, and often counted in polls among the ten Iranian novels that endure.