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Loading... The Blind Owl (original 1937; edition 2010)by Sadegh Hedayat, D.P. Costello (Translator), Porochista Khakpour (Introduction)
Work InformationBlind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (1937)
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Interesting. A bloody, opium fever dream of a book about a man that murders his wife whom he only calls “the bitch.” Pretty unpleasant stuff. Not my cup of tea. This is a fever-dream of a dark, compelling novel, and a reading experience that sucks one in until each moment is its own small psychological impact. A novel that was banned in Hedayat's home country of Iran, the work mounts gorgeous prose, a poetic sensibility, and a sometimes-style of repetition that makes one feel as if they're being sucked into a whirlpool of a story. It's a novel to be sucked into and experience...and perhaps to be read more than once if the darkness isn't too much. Recommended. I feel bad for rating this book only 3 stars. I feel it's because I'm too stupid for it or maybe just that I'm in the wrong sort of mood to enjoy it. The first half-ish of the book was good but when it changes perspective and you have to read the guy calling his wife "the bitch" over and over it gets really grating. Like I found the constant stuff about him being literally dead and everyone else being terrible rabble very repetitive, overwrought and not even vaguely interesting. At the same time I really liked the repetitive symbols like the geometric houses and stub end of cucumber taste because they enhanced the dream-like sense which the best parts of the novel contain, the sense of endless repetition and falling, an eternal hell. It's hard to fit the two parts of the novel together and see the connections while the repetitive symbols are pretty intriguing and create interesting ideas and impressions in my head. The best part is the part around the halfwayish point where You won't find a darker novel than this, and scarcely one better written. It's strange and fascinating to realize that this work boasts best modern classic status in Iranian literature, despite having initially been suppressed there as a potential suicide threat to teenagers. It's encouraging to me that a modern culture exists in which such a gruesomely powerful brief for Death could finally be not only legitimized, but uniquely celebrated, for its literary merit.
A tale of one man’s isolation, the novel contains a maze of symbols, recurring images, social commentary, allusions to opium-induced states, contemplations of the human condition, interjections on art, and references to literary and religious texts—all of which have, for decades, made it fertile ground for critical interpretation. Is contained inNotable Lists
A new English translation of arguably the most famous twentieth-century Persian novel A Penguin Classic A new English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels of the twentieth century A Penguin Classic Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In first person, the narrator offers a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the exact same scene on the covers of pen cases- an old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful woman in black who offers him a water lily. In a one-page transition, the reader finds the narrator covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrest him. In part two, readers glimpse the grim realities that unlock the mysteries of the first part. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat's conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.5533Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Persian languages Modern Persian Persian fiction 1900–2000LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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