The Blind Owl (1937)

I'd like to say that this is the novel that Jackson Pollack would have written if his medium had been words instead of paint, but I don't think it is.

Reading The Blind Owl was like having a feverish hallucination, a nightmare too real to be a dream. It was like swallowing tea steeped in the bones of E. A. Poe, or gulping a liqueur distilled from the carapace of Gregor Samsa. It was like smoking a painting by Bosch, wallowing in the base line of "O Fortuna," fleeing the monster in the labyrinth only to circle back and embrace it--and discover that it is you. ( )

In this surreal novella, an unnamed protagonist unburdens the deadly weight on his chest by confessing to his own grotesquely owl-shaped shadow on the wall.

"in order to explain my life to my stooping shadow, I am obliged to tell a story. Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing!"

In his mind-spinning narration, it is difficult to tell when the events described are cloaked with opium, veiled with madness, or are simple truth. This novel is deeply disturbing in many ways. It narrates horrific events, certainly, but it is the manner that they are conveyed that is frightening. His imagery is surreal. His repetition is hypnotic. His words are oppressive.

"Only death does not lie. The presence of death annihilates all superstitions. We are the children of death and it is death that rescues us from the deceptions of life."

The imagery and symbolism used by Hedayat portrays his personal marriage between Western and Eastern culture. Although this book is considered the essence of Persian literature, there are signs of Poe and Kafka. The Blind Owl bled, vomited, and wept Freudian symbolism.

This was an amazing book, and highly recommended to people interested in Persian fiction or in modernist fiction.

You can read my full review at: http://rachelreadingnthinking.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-blind-owl-by-sadegh-heday... ( )

Following the narrator’s descent into madness, a dark tale examining the human condition.

This is quite bluntly, an amazing piece of work. Hedayat certainly isn’t named as the father of modern Iranian prose for nothing. At only a hundred and thirty pages the book can be read in an afternoon, and merits plenty of rereads to attempt to understand the novel. Hedayat’s language and imagery is stunning. Hedayat is like a cross between Poe and Marquez, with emphasis on Poe. This is one of the better accounts of an insane mind that I’ve read; for example, the narrator will repeat certain images without connecting them to other identical instances.

If you like knowing exactly what’s going on all the time, then I certainly wouldn’t recommend this book to you. Between the magical realism, insane mind, and the narration switching to earlier in his life for the second part, it isn’t always strictly following a predictive arc- but is very enjoyable if you don’t mind that.

Nibble: “His face was ravaged and old, and his hair- the terror aroused by the sound of the cobra’s body as it slid across the floor, by its furious hissing, by its gleaming eyes, by the thought of its poisonous fangs and of its loathsome body shaped like a long neck terminating in a spoon-shaped protuberance and a tiny head, the horror of all this had changed my uncle, by the time he walked out of the room, into a white-haired old man.”

I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys magical realism. ( )

The Blind Owl is an opium-fueled nightmare of one story inside another. The narrator is an unnamed craftsman living in Tehran. He is haunted by dreams or visions containing the same elements: A beautiful but inaccessible woman with large, luminous eyes, and a decrepit old man with a loud, horrid laugh. Inside each vision is another with the same two characters in different identities but always with the same atmosphere of dread and impotence. In each scenario the haunting beauty eludes or rejects the young man, the decrepit old man laughs knowingly, and finally the young man discovers that he has become the old man. It is a grim summary of life and fate, but beautifully expressed. ( )

Perhaps my hopes had been raised too high: from reading some recommendations from one who supposedly is an expert on such literature, claiming this was the most depressing book ever written. And then I heard that some editions even warned the reader in an introductory section, of the dangers of reading this book causing thoughts of suicide.

Either my sensitivity wasn't of a depth necessary to appreciate the moroseness of this work, or I'm just one sick puppy who needs much more in the way of insanity, depravity and doom to move me. After finishing it, I was left wondering, “That's it?” Oh well, looks like I'll live to see another day. ( )