The country of cats
As he had walked aimlessly, the boy had crossed the border of Gorbstan, the country of cats. The patrols found him half-dead, licked his face, and took him to the city. He slept for two more days before he opened his eyes. The city was built around a large pond surrounded by low hills. The...
In the light being cast from the kitchen
It’s difficult to explain why you wake up at 3:35 in the morning with no apparent cause. Just as you are about to lift the lid off the saucepan in your dreams, you wake up suddenly, as if sensing the weight of someone’s gaze on you, and find yourself wrapped up beneath a blanket. You...
Piercing prisms and Persian perspectives
“The truth of memory is strange, isn’t it? Our memories select, eliminate, exaggerate, minimize, glorify, denigrate. They create their own versions of events and serve up their own reality. Disparate but cohesive. Imperfect yet sincere.” Thus begins a compulsive, fiercely resisted, yet inevitable journey into memory in this in many ways extraordinary novel – the...
Négar Djavadi: Neither here nor there
French-Iranian screenwriter Négar Djavadi’s illuminating, richly entertaining debut novel Disoriental combines a sweeping family history in 20th-century Iran with an intimate study of identity and motherhood in contemporary Paris. Kimiâ Sadr is a lesbian punk rocker who spent her teenage years in the French capital after the family fled the trauma of Iran’s 1979 Islamic...
