WITMonth Day 25 | Dying in a Mother Tongue by Roja Chamankar | Minireview

As always, I remain totally stumped when it comes to reviewing poetry. What can I say, other than "I liked this collection!"? The book - not even 70 pages including the translator's note/introduction - feels like a cool summer breeze that passed over me. It gave me immense pleasure as I encountered it and it left a soft memory on my skin. It made me feel something in a distinctly positive sense. But there's not much I can say or do once it's passed. It's passed! That's it!

I guess I can say: Read this, you might enjoy it. You might enjoy, like I did, the diversity in styles between the different poems. You might appreciate, like I did, the way certain poems seem to continue each other (sometimes intentionally and sometimes maybe less so). You might learn about new writers and literary traditions from the translator's note, like I did, and find yourself nodding in agreement with Blake Atwood's description of Roja Chamankar's poems as both "intimate" and "marked by disappointment and loss". You might just like the poems themselves, the translation, the language, and the way the poems feel like they're ready to jump off the page into a new dimension.

You might enjoy this collection. I certainly did.

Note: I received this book for review from the publisher.

WITMonth Day 3 | Disoriental by Négar Djavadi | Review

I won't pretend that I didn't warm to Disoriental more slowly than I was expecting. Négar Djavadi's novel (translated from French by Tina Kovar) was hyped up for me to such an intense degree that I was extremely hesitant to begin reading it. How does one go about reading a novel that everyone has loved, knowing that you always end up with opposing opinions? This time, I can safely say that I did not emerge with a contrary opinion. While it took me about 100 pages to really get into the rhythm of Disoriental, once I did it was hard for me to get out. The book builds slowly, but it builds, pulsing through until a thoroughly satisfying ending.

Reading Disoriental at a rainbowed Grand Canyon

Disoriental tells multiple stories at once, but I'm not sure it's quite the story that the publisher blurb advertises. In fact, I again find myself wondering who wrote the blurb and to what end. The suggestion that this book is a sort of wide-reaching epic, told from Kimiâ's perspective ends up feeling off. Not that Disoriental isn't a wide-reaching story, but Kimiâ - unnamed for a significant portion of the story - hardly features in its first half. As we alternate between Kimiâ's stories of her family history and her own vague, at-present presence in a fertility clinic (why? how old is Kimiâ? where is her partner?), we get a fairly deep exploration of Iran's history and culture.

The imbalance in the narrative is probably what threw me off at first. Last year, I read an Israeli novel מטבעות הזהב של סנובר חנום (roughly translated as Sanober Khanum's Gold Coins), which is a multi-generational story of a Jewish-Iranian family, spanning their origins in northern Iran to their migration to Tehran, and then their relocation to the US, the UK, and Israel. I liked the book a lot and the synopsis of Disoriental definitely reminded me of that novel. Disoriental's opening - mostly historical, distant, written in a deeply reflective style - made me feel like the book was just a little too similar. The writing was good, but it didn't quite mesh. The mysterious initial narration (who is Kimiâ?) made me feel like the book was missing something, not that it was building to something.

But Djavadi proves to be a far more capable writer than that. Indeed, Disoriental achieves that rare feat of growing so precisely that it neither feels like the shift came out of the blue, nor that it never actually lifted off. What's fascinating is that Disoriental is not a thriller by any means, it is simply... thrilling. While Djavadi leaves certain things unspoken until much later in the book (and I use that word deliberately, since it soon emerges that these are not exactly mysteries...), the revelations don't end up feeling like too much of a statement or a process. Kimiâ tells her story differently in different parts, which at first feels like a writing flaw, but soon emerges as one of the more effective means of storytelling at Djavadi's disposal.

Disoriental does a lot. Alongside its family epic (of a sort), it is still a mildly political novel, even as it also... isn't. Of course any novel that writes about Iranian exiles is inherently political, and yet that is never the focus of Djavadi's story. As the narrative jumps backwards and forwards through time, through loops and Kimiâ's meandering thoughts, a small piece of Iran's history does emerge. Sort of. At times. In pieces. (This is something that Kimiâ herself muses about, the nature of political stories and what makes a certain story inherently political. It's a topic that I tried to write about during WITMonth a few years back and I found myself practically punching the book in excitement as I read it in-text.

If the first part of Disoriental is very heavy on Kimiâ's family history, part two insists on making sure we know who exactly we're dealing with. Here, we learn about Kimiâ's own personal history, her childhood, her relationship with her parents and sisters, and her outlook on life. We learn about why she is in the fertility clinic (I prefer to leave this part vague, because I was actually unaware of the reason and quite enjoyed the gentle build until this question was answered). We also learn about the Event that Kimiâ's references throughout part one, the massive, life-changing event that reshaped her life and that of her family. And while it's sort of easy to guess what the Event might be and feeling like it'll just end up being another event that vaguely disappoints (as many of those earth-shaking central mysteries in novels often do), Djavadi surprises by not leaving the mystery ongoing for too long, nor by treating it as something it isn't. Its effect, after all, is focused on Kimiâ herself, creating a far more intimate effect than I expected.

This is how the book builds, and build it does. Even with two clearly defined parts (Kimiâ gently mocks the B-side, which details her story), it never feels like the story shifts in a dramatic way. Kimiâ's narration in particular keeps the story well-grounded and I grew to love her voice. By the time we actually get to know her properly, I felt deeply invested in her life and emotional state. As the second half gently shifts gears, I almost didn't notice how much I cared. It's at the novel's end that it suddenly hit me that I was all in. Which is a fairly effective way to tell a story, if we're going to be honest about it.

That's how all of Disoriental feels - effective. It's not a particularly long book, but it achieves so much, whether in terms of its storytelling technique or its character building or its use of omission and tension. The books works on so many levels by its end, I genuinely felt like I wanted to share it with a dozen more readers. And so I finish this review on that note: This is a wonderful book, well worth your time. Even if you start off a little rocky, like I did. Trust me: It's absolutely worth the journey.

WITMonth Day 27 | The Man Who Snapped His Fingers - Fariba Hachtroudi | Review

Let me just start by saying that you should read The Man Who Snapped His Fingers. It's a good book. It's an interesting book. It has flashes of depth that it doesn't always explore fully, but there's enough to contemplate here and to learn from.

The Man Who Snapped His Fingers translated by the excellent Alison Anderson is the sort of novel that catches you just a bit off guard. The flap - once again - does the book a slight disservice, almost trivializing the novel to that of a relationship that isn't exactly as described. So I came into the novel expecting a flatter sort of story, and was instantly hooked by a completely different sort of narrative.

And when I say hooked, I mean hooked.

The story is almost hypnotic in how it pulses, tugs and draws the reader along. The writing is mostly conversational, often direct in its pleas and presentations. There is an urgency in the way the Colonel relates his story, his anxiety, his unhappiness, his love. Compare this with the equally tense but far less dramatic narration from Vima, whose struggles seem all too close. This is the sort of writing that doesn't release you until you're done, and luckily the book isn't too long so as to inconvenience. (I would even go so far as to say that the book felt like it was at exactly the right length, with excellent pacing.)

The alternating narration bothered me less than I expected, because the shift is relatively gradual. First we have the somewhat incoherent ramblings of the Colonel, as he describes his life as a not-yet-refugee (and all the issues it entails...) and the unclear pieces of his past life. The book does not progress chronologically at any point, with narratives refreshed at different points in the novel from different perspectives. It makes The Man Who Snapped His Fingers perhaps a little less straight-forward than it could have been (and perhaps a bit too "loopy"), but the effect is one of a much longer novel, and one with a lasting impact.

All this without having addressed the politics. And The Man Who Snapped His Fingers is full of politics - the politics of love, the politics of refugees, the politics of oppressive regimes, the politics of gender, the politics of propaganda, the politics of manipulation - without ever feeling like it's especially overwhelming. These issues are at the forefront, but not exhausting. They're intriguing and thought-provoking, without weighing down the emotional core of the novel.

And the emotional core itself is political as well. Is it possible to forgive your torturers? Is it possible to forgive yourself? What does a love story look like from the other angle? What happens at the end of a political love story? The Man Who Snapped His Fingers is not exactly a love story, yet it thrums like one and spoke to me on an emotional level not unlike a very different sort of story.

I liked The Man Who Snapped His Fingers a lot. It was a hypnotic read, entrancing and engaging. I found myself thinking about it a lot in the days after reading it. This is definitely one of those WITMonth books I'm glad to have read, and can comfortably recommend onward.

The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons | Review

I'm honestly surprised that I'd never heard of Goli Taraghi's The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons (tr. Sara Khalili) before reading it. It's not that I think I know of every new book that's published, but as a longtime book blogger, there's always a bit of awareness of new titles. Particularly titles from more mainstream publishers. The irony of it is that I'm often more aware of literature in translation from smaller publishers than I am from the heavy-hitters, where they seem almost passive in their attitudes despite more newspaper coverage. The fact is that I can't recall having seen any reviews of The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons. Fairly undeserved.

It's been a bit over a month since I read this short story collection, so I won't pretend that all the facts and figures are perfectly aligned in my head. But truthfully, that's less relevant for a book of this sort. Like many short story collections, the plot is not really the point. More important is the clear-headed assessment of a culture, and a culture of emigration.

The fact that most of the stories in The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons either revolve around emigration (or return), or some form of outside cultural influence, says quite a bit about the collection as a whole and about the state of Iranian culture. This is not particularly surprising given Taraghi's current status as an expat herself, but there's power to the fact that she continues to write in Farsi. There's meaning to the fact that these stories have such strong themes of coming and going, forming a core that does not dismiss offhand cultural differences between Europe/America and Iran, but also does not entirely embrace them.

One of the nice things about this collection is in its rather excellent balance of pace and story. These are short stories that know how to breathe - nothing is rushed, but no story feels unnecessarily bloated either. One story tells of a dinner party broken up by a raid. There's anxiety running throughout the story, the narrator's tense apprehensions and unease with further complications that result from her arrest. Taraghi's writing conveys this tension without resorting to blunt measures. Everything flows gracefully and smoothly, straight through to the story's end. This makes for a nice change from most novels, and certainly from flash fiction which often ends up missing important story elements.

Though certain themes crop up again, The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons nonetheless relatively succeeds in staying fresh. This is not a collection bogged down by the same story again and again with slight variations; even the most similar stories feel distinct in their characters and settings. Some also sharply deviate from the standard mold, making for an overall bolder, more diverse collection. There's a lot here about human nature, quite a bit about passion and force of will, and sprinkles of love, often in the most roundabout way.

I liked The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons when I really didn't think I would. The stories grow on a reader, and though the writing was a little awkward at times (a fault whose source I'm not sure of - writer or translator...), generally speaking I found myself delving quite deeply into each story. Nothing bombastic happens in any of these stories, nor are they unique for their sparseness. Instead, Taraghi looks at characters (primarily women) in different situations, calmly building the broader world around these characters and ending on just the right note. All in all, a good, balanced collection, deserving of more attention.