Unrated
The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat | 1936 | Wisehouse Publishing | Ebook $ 7.30
Widely regarded as Sadegh Hedayat’s masterpiece, The Blind Owl is the most important work of literature to come out of Iran in the past century. On the surface this work seems to be a tale of doomed love, but with the turning of each page basic facts become obscure and the reader soon realizes this book is much more than a love story. Although The Blind Owl has been compared to the works of Kafka, Rilke, and Poe, this work defies categorization.
The vast majority of the books I’ve read + have on my to-read list were written in English by American or Western European authors; I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but I also don’t want to limit myself to only reading stories from those perspectives. I’ve been trying to make more of an effort to read works in translation, especially by authors from cultures which are very different from my own. I chose to read this particular novella because it was written in Farsi by an Iranian author while he lived in Paris, then was first published in India; it is now considered a classic work of 20th century Persian literature.
The Blind Owl is one of those rare works that so effectively depicts a person’s descent into dark madness that it threatens to drag the reader under, too. It reminded me a bit of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, albeit much more violent.
The story is told from the perspective of a man who has gone entirely off the deep end, which makes it a bit hard to follow but also makes it intriguing to read, rather like assembling a mosaic made of smashed-up thoughts instead of smashed-up tiles. The book otherwise feels slightly impossible to describe. I might also say that it is poetic, yes, but in such an alienating, disjointed, lunatic sort of way that it can’t possibly be called poetry.
I was surprised to learn that this work has been banned several times in Iran, given its current status as classic lit (though upon further reflection I really shouldn’t have been, given its gruesome subject matter). I don’t know if it’s still banned at this time; I suspect so, but couldn’t find any solid confirmation online. In any case, whether it is original to the work or a contemporary addition, the copy provided by my library includes this notice: “The printing and sale of this work in Iran is forbidden.”
I don’t quite know how to rate this one. It’s so different from almost anything else I’ve read — interesting and poetic, like I said, but also just plain disturbing and so far out of my own experience that I feel like I don’t really have good reference points by which to judge it.
Links:
- Biography of Sadegh Hedayat from the Iran Chamber Society
- “This Book Will End Your Life: The Greatest Persian Novel Ever Written” article by Porochista Khakpour in The Rumpus
- “Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl: Can We Transcend Despair Through the Act of Writing?” article by Dalia Sofer in The Believer
Publication information: Hedayat, Sadegh. The blind owl. Ballingslöv, Sweden: Wisehouse Publishing, 2011. Ebook.
Source: Public library, via Hoopla.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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