WELLBEING GUARD

A young doctor’s skills are put to the test when he’s assigned to work in a remote Iranian village in Maany’s slender memoir.

The debut author details his experience as a country doctor, beginning in the late 1960s, fairlylate in the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Though Maany had ambitions of coming to the United States, he was first required to complete two years of military service in his home country of Iran. To fulfill his requirement, he signed up with the Sepahe-Behdasht—the titular “Wellbeing Guard,” also known as the “Army of Health”—to practice medicine in a far-off part of the country. Maany chose to work in the small village of Resket Sofla. Although each of this memoir’s chapters tells self-contained stories, their overarching focus quickly becomes the hazards of working as a doctor in isolated, often treacherous rural terrain. Maany became an essential health care worker, serving a 50-mile radius around Resket—a region seemingly plagued by inclement weather and dangerous wildlife and where the main means of travel was on horseback. The book’s greatest strength is Maany’s attention to quotidian routines; images of domesticated animals drinking from a nearby fountain by Resket’s rundown clinic, for example, help give the memoir a rich sense of place, and passages that dive into the rustic, ordinary lives of villagers are where the book’s at its finest. However, it’s hindered by repetitive phrasing and a lack of depth. Maany very often “note[s]” his observations, overusing the word and creating an unfortunate distance between his narration and the reader, and too often, he simply lists people he helped and places where he worked, never allowing one to get a sense of his firsthand experience. Much of the book is written in the past or pluperfect tenses, but there are occasional slips (“I have been confined” opens one chapter); the memoir does eventually barrel into the present day, following the doctor as he completed his service and moved to the U.S., ultimately ending with pat truisms about “peace of mind.”

A potentially rich document of medical life, undone by awkward prose and unrevealing narration.