Said Sayrafiezadeh

This is a collection of short stories that focus on young men who are treading water in their lives, dealing with entry-level jobs, mothers dying of cancer and a general inability to have things go smoothly. But Saïd Sayrafiezadeh also fills these stories with ordinary pleasures and glimpses of hope; a man remembers when his mother buys him a shirt at Goodwill that gives him credibility at his new school or a young man stuck in a dead end job meets a girl he likes. Sayrafiezadeh doesn't show more mind making the reader uncomfortable or uncertain. He's writing about the working class, the marginalized and the discontented. And the stories are quietly perfect, from the clear and unobtrusive writing, to the way the author creates vivid settings within a single paragraph. This book reminded me of why I love short stories so much, that when they are well-crafted, they contain entire lives in single moments. show less

Radicalism of any stripe tends to make people less compassionate - their ideology takes the place of real human relationships. This is shown in Sayarfiezadeh's memoir, as his dyed-in-the-wool communist parents are so self-involved and immersed in the world of the Party that they give little thought to how to raise their son. Amazingly, Sayrafiezadeh seems to emerge from the twin childhood traumas of neglect and indoctrination relatively psychologically unscathed. The narrator's politics seem show more to end up muddled - he has no strong opinion about communism; in fact, he doesn't even know what it is. show less

I ended up liking this quite a bit. It needs to be read all together—the stories are not so much linked as forming a kind of wallpaper, a zeitgeist of an unnamed 21st-century mid-American town and an unnamed 21st-century war, from the viewpoint of a series of mid-level-achieving young white men. They have vaguely antagonistic relationships with other guys, vaguely aspirational relationships with women, not much in the way of ambition. I realize that doesn't make them sound particularly show more attractive as subjects, but that's pretty much the point—they're both real and allegorical at the same time.

The stories themselves are a bit myth-like, in the way certain male writers at the beginning of the last century would write about the war in stories that were close to parables, but not quite. The key here being that Sayrafiezadeh has good control over both his writing and his myth-making, and the collection as a whole added up to something interesting. I definitely want to go back and read his memoir now. show less

This is a memoir by Said Sayrafiezadeh (pronounced say-RAH-fee-ZAH-day), son of a Jewish mother and an Iranian father, members of the Socialist Workers Party who had three children. Said was the youngest, and when he was only nine months old his father abandoned him. His older siblings soon went off with the father, and he was left to be raised by his ideologically-obsessed, ascetic mother who raised him in strict accordance with the denial preached by party principles. Said’s mother was show more convinced that their struggles and sacrifices would lead to The Revolution. But it wasn’t clear to Said what The Revolution would mean. When he worked up the nerve to ask his mother for an $11 skateboard, she told him “Once the revolution comes, everyone will have a skateboard, because all skateboards will be free.” Did that suggest it was good to want materialist things after all?

In the meantime, they lived in abject poverty, and his mother denigrated those with money as “rich asses.” This created more confusion for Said: his mother's brother was Mark Harris, author of Bang the Drum Slowly, and a nice man whose offers of pecuniary help were refused. Was he a "rich ass"?

Their lives were determined by "political correctness." There was an elementary school right by their house, but Said's mother had him take a very long round-trip bus ride everyday to a black school (where the white kids would be separated out anyway as "scholars" so that they never interacted with the blacks). His mother would not permit them to buy grapes, but Said could steal them. His mother would fill her knapsack with towelettes from the doctor’s office. “Any crime against society is a good crime,” she would tell him.

Her bookshelves were filled with party tomes that never had their spines cracked, and she could no more explain to Said the substance behind the slogans than he could explain it later in life. Nevertheless, the slogans came to his mind automatically; they had become a part of him, even without any understanding. They were a part of his ties to his family.

Said’s father Mahmoud, absent and uncaring, with his constant rejections of Said, nevertheless held a fascination for him. Said never even knew what to call him, and so he never called him anything. Since the publication of this book, Said's father does not speak to him at all, presumably because of the exposure of his abandonment and mistreatment of his family, as well as (probably) his failures as a would-be revolutionary.

Other reviews point to the humor of Sayrafiezadeh’s memoir, but I had trouble seeing anything but pain and abuse. I thought it was one of the saddest stories I ever read. show less