SEASONS OF PURGATORY, English-language debut story collection from exiled Iranian author

SEASONS OF PURGATORY
SHAHRIYAR MANDANIPOUR (tr. Sara Khalili)
Bellevue Literary Press
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award for Literature in Translation!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The first English-language story collection from “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” (Guardian)

In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.

Shahriar Mandanipour is an award-winning, exiled Iranian author and journalist who served in the Iran-Iraq war. His fiction has been published throughout the world, including two acclaimed novels published in English. He lives in California.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Men, men, men...all men, all the time. Even when a female person appears, she isn't really given anything to do except respond to the men around her. There's a lot of that down to the war background that the stories share; a lot of serious issues in war just don't make room for women. The war happens to all the characters, in all the time-frames and settings the different stories take place in. Nothing about these particular men says they are, or feel, in control of too much in their different worlds.

The disorientation of the world as it is run by totalitarians is evident in the slightly seasick sensation of being tossed from time-frame to time-frame between and within stories. Occasionally we are placed in medias res within a thought or a sentence. It does what it's intended to do and leaves the reader unsure, not in control, just as the characters are not. The author is not yclept with "award-winning" for playing it safe, after all. He doesn't spoon-feed one's imagination but requires us to attend to the words and images we're presented in order to derive our full measure of aesthetic pleasure from them.

Unexpectedly, I herewith revive the Bryce Method of offering a story-by-story opinion of each piece.

Shadows of the Cave revels in the aging man's pleasure of Being Right About Things. Mr. Farvaneh has a window in his apartment overlooking the smelly, gross zoo and its caged beasts:

"If you realize that people are mocking you, and you behave in such a way that they remain ignorant of your realization, and especially if you repeat the cause of their mockery, it is, in fact, you who has mocked them and who has the upper hand. These {zoo} animals use the same intelligent ploy; with only a few exceptions, in their cage they behave as they would in the jungle. At times their indifference to humans is truly insulting. Don't you understand?" No! Many didn't grasp this fine point, or they didn't want to.

As old men will, Mr. Farvaneh keeps trying to elucidate his vision of the present and its awful stench, its degeneracy from The Noble Past, reads his history books, and occasionally shouts at people to leave him alone. He is, in other words, me. I approve this ironical quirked eyebrow of an extended metaphor. 4 stars

Mummy and Honey tells a Faulknerian tale of the Wages of Greed, Pride, and Sin...and spends a lot of time talking about a viper and a bitter orange tree, which clearly have a cultural resonance that is lost on me. I wouldn't expect a Farsi speaker to get, for example, a central image of a magnolia tree in a Southern Gothic story, and that's what this felt like to me. Still and all, an enjoyable tale if just a bit too long. 4 stars

Shatter the Stone Tooth First, read this:

Then he wrote a lot about the mud huts that are connected to one another by underground tunnels, and of villagers with trachoma, and of "gusts of dust that get into your throat and make you retch," and he wrote, "Would you believe that dust can rot?" I can't believe he wrote this letter. His earlier letters were not like this; they were real letters. Even his handwriting used to enchant me. His letters were filled with words that men in love string together an that every woman loves to read or hear, even though just after they are read or heard they seem banal.

A woman mourns the death, of sorts, of the young man who left her for the regime's benefit; he goes to a remote place to be of service to people who didn't ask for help, so they won't become a fifth column for the regime's enemies. It's a soul-killing job he's doing, to give your life up to live for others who don't want you or care about you. The narrator's only role is to witness for us the death of hope. Bleak, bleak, bleak but piercingly honest. 4 stars

Seasons of Purgatory gives us, from the start, the kind of body-horror story that wars toss into civilian worlds like grenades; but in addition the story offers an especially bleak look at how power works down among the powerless. It is perfectly told, and is my second-favorite story in the collection. 5 stars

If She Has No Coffin indulges a child's belief in and discovery of Goodness via her father's acceptance of her imaginary friend. Her imaginary friend is wicked, honest, and unruly...all the things she isn't allowed to be. Bleak wartime fiction illuminated by paternal love, probably misplaced. A little gem of the price that dishonesty, even for the most kindly of motives, exacts from the liar. Very interesting, given the place the author's exiled from, that the trip to the graveyard to "bury" the "dead" imaginary friend, is interrupted by bombs falling at random, as they do. 4 stars

King of the Graveyard grieves the denied rituals of grief that enable the grief-stricken in their necessary release of hope. The old couple whose son is buried in cold earth but unmarked for and unknown to them bicker and argue and blame but never dare to speak the truth. Their son died for nothing, and they're left with the amputated stumps of life and love and the future. And there is no place to put that grief, that pain, that rage at the waste and futility of war over trifles. My favorite story. 5 stars

The Color of Midday Fire goes into a father's grief as his beloved daughter is eaten by a leopard, upon which creature he vows to revenge himself. Only, as the opportunity arises, the reality of revenge as the most futile act of destruction there is, comes down on him. A lesson for more men to learn in this world. 3.5 stars

Seven Captains is another damn sausage-fest...yes, there's a woman in it; she attempts to make a choice for herself and, in accordance with the culture, pays the ultimate price. This male-sexual-possession "honor" stuff gets old for me. The real emotional heart of the story to me was one man's sccumbaggy betrayal of another over a woman. 3 stars because it's beautifully written but I don't enjoy the story

If You Didn't Kill the Cuckoo Bird reveals a very personal sense of hurt in the author from his condition of living in exile. The sheer misery of the prison that totalitarians make of our own minds is appalling, enduring, and intentional. Has anyone escaped? Is there a second man inside the man? What, inside the tight confines of a cell, is real? Even bodies are fungible. 4 stars