Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.
A star-crossed romance captures the turmoil of pre-revolutionary Iran in Seraji’s debut.
From the rooftops of Tehran in 1973, life looks pretty good to 17-year-old Pasha Shahed and his friend Ahmed. They’re bright, funny and good-looking; they’re going to graduate from high school in a year; and they’re in love with a couple of the neighborhood girls. But all is not idyllic. At first the girls scarcely know the boys are alive, and one of them, Zari, is engaged to Doctor—not actually a doctor but an exceptionally gifted and politically committed young Iranian. In this neighborhood, the Shah is a subject of contempt rather than veneration, and residents fear SAVAK, the state’s secret police force, which operates without any restraint. Pasha, the novel’s narrator and prime dreamer, focuses on two key periods in his life: the summer and fall of 1973, when his life is going rather well, and the winter of 1974, when he’s incarcerated in a grim psychiatric hospital. Among the traumatic events he relates are the sudden arrest, imprisonment and presumed execution of Doctor. Pasha feels terrible because he fears he might have inadvertently been responsible for SAVAK having located Doctor’s hiding place; he also feels guilty because he’s always been in love with Zari. She makes a dramatic political statement, setting herself on fire and sending Pasha into emotional turmoil. He is both devastated and further worried when the irrepressible Ahmed also seems to come under suspicion for political activity. Pasha turns bitterly against religion, raising the question of God’s existence in a world in which the bad guys seem so obviously in the ascendant. Yet the badly scarred Zari assures him, “Things will change—they always do.”
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22681-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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