Novel · A way to begin
The Blind Owl
بوف کور
Sadegh Hedayat · 1936
Synopsis
A painter of pen-case lids lives secluded outside the city, given over to wine and opium, and paints always the same scene: an old man bent beneath a cypress, and a girl in black holding out a flower to him across a stream. One evening, through a skylight that does not exist, he sees the real scene; later, the girl comes into his home, lies down on his bed and dies, and an old hearse driver helps him bury her. In the second part, he tells his shadow on the wall about his life as a sick man beside the wife he calls only “the whore”.
Context
Having come to Bombay in 1936 at the invitation of a friend who was a vice-consul, the author produced the book there, written by hand on stencils, in about fifty copies distributed to friends outside Iran; according to a close acquaintance, the text had been written in Europe. The novel appeared as a serial in the weekly Iran in the autumn of 1941, after Reza Shah's abdication, then in book form. Roger Lescot's French translation, in 1953, and the English one, in 1957, made it the only Iranian modernist work read outside the Persian-speaking world; in Iran, its author's works have been banned since 1980.
Who it is for
Short but gruelling, circular, with no resolved plot. You should know that the second part takes up the first under other faces, and that the reader never knows what actually took place.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first great Persian modernist novel and as its author's masterpiece; translated into French as early as 1953 and retranslated since.