censoring an iranian love story a novel shahriar mandanipour

Novelists fret over how to get their characters into and out of rooms, but what if their characters weren’t allowed to be in those rooms in the first place? How might one write a love story about a young man and woman, set in a country in which the unmarried couple is not allowed to spend any significant time together? At the beginning of “Censoring an Iranian Love Story,” two Tehran natives, Dara and Sara, meet at a student demonstration outside Tehran University, and spend the next two hundred and eighty pages attempting not so much to consummate their relationship as simply to begin it.

And it takes as its subject exactly these paradoxes, for it is explicitly about what can and cannot be written in contemporary Iranian fiction. His book is thus acutely displaced: it had to have been written with an audience outside of Iran in mind, but in a language that this audience would mostly not understand it depends on translation for its being, yet its being is thoroughly Iranian, lovingly and allusively so, dense with local reference. This novel, his first major work to be translated into English, was written in Farsi but cannot be read in Iran. He came to the United States in 2006, as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University, and stayed in America. Mandanipour, a distinguished Iranian novelist and short-story writer, was prohibited from publishing his fiction in his native country between 19. Tyranny is the mother of metaphor, and all that.Īmong other things, Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel “Censoring an Iranian Love Story” (translated by Sara Khalili Knopf $25) is a tough reply to such maundering. Instead of drowning in choice, we would have to be inventive around our thirst. What if writing were made a bit more exigent for us? What if we had less of everything? It might make our literary culture more “serious,” certainly more creatively ingenious. Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. And what do we know about life? Our grand tour was only through the gently borderless continent of Google. A day in which the most arduous choice has been between “grande” and “tall” does not conduce to literary strenuousness. Coming up with anything to write about can be difficult when you are allowed to write about anything. Sometimes, the soft literary citizens of liberal democracy long for prohibition. Photograph by Shirin Neshat, “Whispers” from “Women of Allah Series” (1997) / Gladstone Gallery Shahriar Mandanipour’s lovers are forever trying to elude the morals patrol narrative play is conditioned by political reality.

Censoring an iranian love story a novel shahriar mandanipour