Blind Owl
7 journalers for this copy...
from Amazon:
The Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat is the most influential figure in twentieth-century Persian fiction--and the object of a kind of cult after his suicide in 1951. His masterpiece The Blind Owl is the most important novel of modern Iran. Its abrupt, tortured opening sentence, "There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker," is one of the best known and most frequently recited passages of modern Persian. But underneath the book's uncanniness and its narrative eccentricities, Michael Beard traces an elegant pastiche of familiar Western traditions. A work of advocacy for a disturbing and powerful piece of fiction, his comprehensive analysis reveals the significance of The Blind Owl as a milestone not only for Persian writing but also for world literature. The international, decentered nature of modernist writing outside the West, typified by Hedayat's European education and wide reading in the Western canon, suggested to Beard the strategy of assessing The Blind Owl as if it were a Western novel. Viewed in this context, Hedayat's intricate chronicle challenges the very notion of a national literature, rethinking and reshaping our traditions until we are compelled, "through its eyes," to see them in a new way.
The Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat is the most influential figure in twentieth-century Persian fiction--and the object of a kind of cult after his suicide in 1951. His masterpiece The Blind Owl is the most important novel of modern Iran. Its abrupt, tortured opening sentence, "There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker," is one of the best known and most frequently recited passages of modern Persian. But underneath the book's uncanniness and its narrative eccentricities, Michael Beard traces an elegant pastiche of familiar Western traditions. A work of advocacy for a disturbing and powerful piece of fiction, his comprehensive analysis reveals the significance of The Blind Owl as a milestone not only for Persian writing but also for world literature. The international, decentered nature of modernist writing outside the West, typified by Hedayat's European education and wide reading in the Western canon, suggested to Beard the strategy of assessing The Blind Owl as if it were a Western novel. Viewed in this context, Hedayat's intricate chronicle challenges the very notion of a national literature, rethinking and reshaping our traditions until we are compelled, "through its eyes," to see them in a new way.
Journal Entry 2 by katayoun at Post in a friend, By Mail/Post/Courier -- Controlled Releases on Sunday, October 17, 2004
Released 19 yrs ago (10/16/2004 UTC) at Post in a friend, By Mail/Post/Courier -- Controlled Releases
WILD RELEASE NOTES:
RELEASE NOTES:
hope you enjoy it
hope you enjoy it
I am so lucky. Received this as a RABCK which came together with a bookring book. I have had this on my wishlist for some time and I look forward to reading it and discussing it with my Iranian work collegue.
Thank you for your kindness katayoun and for the postcard of the bronze artifact.
UPDATE Mar-05 Currently on loan to my Iranian work collegue Mohammad.
UPDATE Aug-05 - he returned it to me after struggling to read it - his English reading is not very good.
Thank you for your kindness katayoun and for the postcard of the bronze artifact.
UPDATE Mar-05 Currently on loan to my Iranian work collegue Mohammad.
UPDATE Aug-05 - he returned it to me after struggling to read it - his English reading is not very good.
What an amazing and unique reading experience this novel was. Once I got past the first few pages with a some poorly translated words, I was able to ignore the errors and could hardly put it down.
Such a strange tale about madness, I thought at times it was a story written in an opium daze.
The writer’s pen case seems to be the basis of the two characters that recur in different guises throughout the story. Beautiful black cloaked women obsess him, from the “beautiful girl whom he recognizes as the incarnation of his dreams”, to the “bitch” his wife who also haunts him. We are also presented with bent old men throughout the novel from the odds-and-ends man to the butcher. The drunken policemen, the bottle of wine on the top shelf, the bone-handled knife and blood all recur throughout the novel.
I have not read anything like this before, and should seek out Poe to whom his writing is compared.
Thank you for sharing this with me katayoun. I will offer this book up as an aussie bookring because I think others will also appreciate it.
Such a strange tale about madness, I thought at times it was a story written in an opium daze.
The writer’s pen case seems to be the basis of the two characters that recur in different guises throughout the story. Beautiful black cloaked women obsess him, from the “beautiful girl whom he recognizes as the incarnation of his dreams”, to the “bitch” his wife who also haunts him. We are also presented with bent old men throughout the novel from the odds-and-ends man to the butcher. The drunken policemen, the bottle of wine on the top shelf, the bone-handled knife and blood all recur throughout the novel.
I have not read anything like this before, and should seek out Poe to whom his writing is compared.
Thank you for sharing this with me katayoun. I will offer this book up as an aussie bookring because I think others will also appreciate it.
Offering this as an aussie bookring.What should I do when I receive the book?
1. Log on to Bookcrossing and write a journal entry so I know it reached you safely.
2. Please try to read the book within 30 days and then add another journal entry with your thoughts about the book. Tell the truth! Was it the best thing you ever read or a complete and utter waste of time? - you can write one sentence or a hundred.
3. When you finish, PM the next reader and send the book along to them.
What if I’m the last in line? PM me and I will send you my mailing address as I really want this book back.
Readers so far:-
aleonblue Bris,QLD
Arrietty Adel,SA
xoddam Syd,NSW
buggyhare Bris,QLD Leave till end, has many rings/rays TBR
puppymummy
Update 24/10/05
Off to aleonblue in today's mail. Postage is $1.45
Received this book in this morning's post - am really looking forward to this one!
This certainly was different to anything I'd read before and I think a good description of someone descending into either heavy drug addiction or madness - or probably both. I enjoyed the Iranian cultural context of the book, as opposed to the western books that I usually read. It does bring back distant memories of Edgar Allen Poe, who I haven't read for a long time, and must seek out again.
Thanks to both katayoun and meganh for sharing this book. I'll have to look out for more books from the Iranina/Persian culture.
Sending off to Arrietty in Monday's mail
Thanks to both katayoun and meganh for sharing this book. I'll have to look out for more books from the Iranina/Persian culture.
Sending off to Arrietty in Monday's mail
Oops sorry I did receive this book last week and forgot to let you know. It won't take long to read as it's very thin. Thanks Meganh.
A most compelling read! Heavy with symbolism and sexual allusions, it would a radical feminist theorist's most satisfying review! It is really a quite powerful novel of a man's innermost search for meaning to his existence. In fact I was reminded of the Western Existentialist literature like Camus's 'L'etranger' but I think that was written later and I'm no expert. As I was reading the book I kept getting flashes of the movie of Kafka's The Trial (I just watched it a few days ago) - the surreal images which underpins the Blind Owl. I was also struck with the similarities between the protagonists in Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Blind Owl'. I was therefore not surprised when I read the autobiography at the end and discovered that he was influenced by both these authors!
I particularly was impressed with some of the imagery which builds the tension and surreal atmosphere. This for instance:
'I had quite lost my previous boldness. I had become like the flies which crowd indoors at the beginning of the autumn, think half-dead flies which are afraid at first of the buzzing of their own wings and cling to some one point of the wall until they realise that they are alive, then they fling themselves recklessly against doors and walls until they fall dead around the floor'.
The book is full of the of blood, decomposition, foul odours, carcasses etc, symbols of disintegration which is what is happening to the narrator's mind and body. Not for the faint-hearted. I wouldn't really compare the book with Poe's work except for the build up of tension and obsession eg 'Tell-tale heart'. I think Hedayat is a rich, symbolic writer and I like the way he weaves the Persian's folklore into the story which gives it a supernatural quality. After you read the book which is quite short but disturbingly complex, you have to read something light and frothy.
thanks meganh and katayoun for giving me the opportunity to read some classic Persian fiction. Now it's off to Xoddam.
I particularly was impressed with some of the imagery which builds the tension and surreal atmosphere. This for instance:
'I had quite lost my previous boldness. I had become like the flies which crowd indoors at the beginning of the autumn, think half-dead flies which are afraid at first of the buzzing of their own wings and cling to some one point of the wall until they realise that they are alive, then they fling themselves recklessly against doors and walls until they fall dead around the floor'.
The book is full of the of blood, decomposition, foul odours, carcasses etc, symbols of disintegration which is what is happening to the narrator's mind and body. Not for the faint-hearted. I wouldn't really compare the book with Poe's work except for the build up of tension and obsession eg 'Tell-tale heart'. I think Hedayat is a rich, symbolic writer and I like the way he weaves the Persian's folklore into the story which gives it a supernatural quality. After you read the book which is quite short but disturbingly complex, you have to read something light and frothy.
thanks meganh and katayoun for giving me the opportunity to read some classic Persian fiction. Now it's off to Xoddam.
The book had a little sojourne in Adelaide to a fellow BC who is interested in classic literature from twenties and thirties. Hopefully it will get another journal entry and Blind Owl has now been returned to me and will be sent to Xoddam this week.
This is on its way to Xoddam
Journal Entry 12 by xoddam from Springwood, New South Wales Australia on Thursday, December 22, 2005
Another beautiful book for my big, big pile. Thankyou katayoun, meganh, arrietty ... I will read it *soon*, I promise!
Aide shoma mobarak! / Happy New Year! (and all that).
Aide shoma mobarak! / Happy New Year! (and all that).
The novel tells the same tale several times over, I suppose from the perspective of different dreams or opium-induced trances.
The first telling is at once the most fantastically magical and the most credible, reading like one of the tales of the Arabian Nights. It is the story of a gift, the body and soul of a beautiful woman, which the woman gives freely and wholly and the recipient accepts gratefully and then reverently destroys.
The addition of context, believable characters and motivation in the later chapters removed all my sympathy for the narrator. (But read Iraj Bashiri's lecture linked below).
I did not read the reviews above before I read this book. I am surprised (and pleased) how similar my impression of the book is to Arrietty's. I too was put immediately in mind of Camus' L'Etranger (which was written in 1942, some five years after The Blind Owl but long before any translation Camus might have read). When searching online for the two author's names to see if they met or read one another's work, this very page wasn't too far down the list of results! As for feminism -- this is a classically misogynist story; all women are idolised save for the Nurse who suckled the protagonist and his wife "the botch" together and remains their domestic servant into their adulthood.
There's no implication that the novel was written in verse, but its poetry is undeniable. Repetition is a vital feature; this translation doesn't do it justice. The hacking cough, strange houses of geometrical shapes, being "so ashamed I could sink into the ground". The dreamlike repetition of these passages, emotions, actions and images evokes the stupor of fever and addiction.
The narrator is utterly alienated, to the point that he calls no-one by name but the exotic mother he never met and refers to everyone out there on the street as 'rabble-men'. He is mad and he is a drug addict. But the overwhelming impression I got of him is one of misogyny. He idolises, hates and destroys female beauty.
Some resources I found online don't exactly contradict this view, but make it less of a central feature:
I think Iraj Bashiri's English translation of The Blind Owl is better than the one in this edition (by D P Costello).
On the same site is a very intriguing and well-informed lecture on the novel and the sources of its imagery.
The first telling is at once the most fantastically magical and the most credible, reading like one of the tales of the Arabian Nights. It is the story of a gift, the body and soul of a beautiful woman, which the woman gives freely and wholly and the recipient accepts gratefully and then reverently destroys.
The addition of context, believable characters and motivation in the later chapters removed all my sympathy for the narrator. (But read Iraj Bashiri's lecture linked below).
I did not read the reviews above before I read this book. I am surprised (and pleased) how similar my impression of the book is to Arrietty's. I too was put immediately in mind of Camus' L'Etranger (which was written in 1942, some five years after The Blind Owl but long before any translation Camus might have read). When searching online for the two author's names to see if they met or read one another's work, this very page wasn't too far down the list of results! As for feminism -- this is a classically misogynist story; all women are idolised save for the Nurse who suckled the protagonist and his wife "the botch" together and remains their domestic servant into their adulthood.
There's no implication that the novel was written in verse, but its poetry is undeniable. Repetition is a vital feature; this translation doesn't do it justice. The hacking cough, strange houses of geometrical shapes, being "so ashamed I could sink into the ground". The dreamlike repetition of these passages, emotions, actions and images evokes the stupor of fever and addiction.
The narrator is utterly alienated, to the point that he calls no-one by name but the exotic mother he never met and refers to everyone out there on the street as 'rabble-men'. He is mad and he is a drug addict. But the overwhelming impression I got of him is one of misogyny. He idolises, hates and destroys female beauty.
Some resources I found online don't exactly contradict this view, but make it less of a central feature:
I think Iraj Bashiri's English translation of The Blind Owl is better than the one in this edition (by D P Costello).
On the same site is a very intriguing and well-informed lecture on the novel and the sources of its imagery.
In the mail to puppymummy on Monday afternoon.
Safely received. Looking forward to it!
Journal Entry 16 by puppymummy from Melbourne CBD, Victoria Australia on Saturday, February 18, 2006
It's been a long time since I read Edgar Allan Poe, but the resemblance was striking for me - similar moody writing and themes, although I haven't read the other authors mentioned. Thanks everyone for the opportunity to read this!
A 'loaner' from meganh which I'm really looking forward to reading. I'll get to it ASAP.
Just couldn't get into this one - despite a couple of attempts. I think it was probably more a fault of 'where my head is at' than the novel itself, but I found it dense, overwritten and confusing.
I'll return it to meganh at meetup next week, with thanks and my regrets for not being a more 'switched on' reader!
I'll return it to meganh at meetup next week, with thanks and my regrets for not being a more 'switched on' reader!
This little book has come back home to me and onto my bookshelf it goes. Thanks all for reading and journalling this special RABCK from my BC friend katayoun.
