When I noticed today in my blog stats that I have readers from Iran I felt extremely touched. Of all the places my father visited in his lifetime and of all the languages he spoke Iran and Farsii were perhaps closest to his heart. He had a deep respect for Persian history and rightfully so, but above all things he loved the book "The Blind Owl" (بوف کور ).
I read the book only just a few years ago myself and immediately understood what drew my father to this book. The unnamed narrator, a painter of minatures, seeks to cure a disease that erodes "the mind in solitude like a kind of canker".
Hedayat left Tehran in the 1940's to study existential philosophy with Jean-Paul Sartre and is considered the best Persian author of the last century. He devoted his entire life to the study of Western literature and Iranian history and folklore. He was intrigued by the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka, and Anton Chekhov.
He sadly committed suicide in Paris in 1951 and sadder still, his books have recently been censored and are carried less and less both in Iran and in Paris bookshops. Henry Miller and André Breton were among the writers who praised Hedayat and his book "The Blind Owl", which the narrator says in the first chapter he wrote so that he would know himself and make himself known to his shadow.
During his lifetime Hedayat was a prolific short story writer and worked on many translations of Kafka, Sartre, and Chekhov, but The Blind Owl is perhaps his greatest work.
Today I was reminded of the list of books my father made for me of books I should try to read in my lifetime and how The Blind Owl was one of the first on the list. So ممنون "mamoon" to my Iranian readers from making me smile this morning and for making me take it from the shelf and read again the moments that most captivated me and for allowing me to have again the feeling that Hedayat's prose always pulls from my heart. Few books are more beautifully written. Very, very few.
I read the book only just a few years ago myself and immediately understood what drew my father to this book. The unnamed narrator, a painter of minatures, seeks to cure a disease that erodes "the mind in solitude like a kind of canker".
Hedayat left Tehran in the 1940's to study existential philosophy with Jean-Paul Sartre and is considered the best Persian author of the last century. He devoted his entire life to the study of Western literature and Iranian history and folklore. He was intrigued by the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka, and Anton Chekhov.
He sadly committed suicide in Paris in 1951 and sadder still, his books have recently been censored and are carried less and less both in Iran and in Paris bookshops. Henry Miller and André Breton were among the writers who praised Hedayat and his book "The Blind Owl", which the narrator says in the first chapter he wrote so that he would know himself and make himself known to his shadow.
During his lifetime Hedayat was a prolific short story writer and worked on many translations of Kafka, Sartre, and Chekhov, but The Blind Owl is perhaps his greatest work.
Today I was reminded of the list of books my father made for me of books I should try to read in my lifetime and how The Blind Owl was one of the first on the list. So ممنون "mamoon" to my Iranian readers from making me smile this morning and for making me take it from the shelf and read again the moments that most captivated me and for allowing me to have again the feeling that Hedayat's prose always pulls from my heart. Few books are more beautifully written. Very, very few.
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