While Sara finds herself falling for Dara, she is also considering the marriage proposal of a well-to-do entrepreneur named Sinbad, whom her family wants her to marry. Sinbad is not an unappealing figure, and his wealth would enable her to help her relatives and buy the freedom to travel to the West.
While recounting the adventures of his characters, Mandanipour also shares the travails of being an Iranian writer. He says he is “tired of writing dark and bitter stories, stories populated by ghosts and dead narrators with predictable endings of death and destruction,” but while he wants to tell a love story, he knows that this is not easy in a country where a censor scours books for “immoral and corruptive words and phrases”
that might pollute readers’ minds, and where “there is a politico-religious presumption that any proximity and discourse between a man and a woman who are neither married nor related is a prologue to deadly sin.”
He tells us about the linguistic acrobatics required to circumvent the censors; the complexities of censorship in Iran, where there is a literary tradition of using ornate metaphors and similes for bodily and sexual attributes (including lots of fruit, flower and food imagery); and the government’s reported use of Western computer software to identify the authors of literary works published under pseudonyms.
As the novel progresses, the author’s relationship with a censor who works under the alias of Porfiry Petrovich (the name of the magistrate in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment) grows increasingly complicated, as does his relationship with his own characters, who, he suggests, have begun to escape his control.
Some of Mandanipour’s efforts to inject his story with surreal, postmodern elements feel
distinctly strained (the intermittent appearances of a hunchbacked midget, in particular, are annoying), but he’s managed, by the end, to build a clever Rubik’s Cube of a story, while at the same time giving readers a haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran: arduous, demoralizing and constricted even before the brutalities of the current crackdown.
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