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.

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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

HAFEZ IN LOVE, so smoothly translated I forgot it wasn't English from the get-go

HAFEZ IN LOVE
IRAJ PEZESHKZAD (tr. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi & Patricia J. Higgins)
Syracuse University Press
$24.95 all editions, available now

Save 40% off on direct-from-publisher purchases of all literature in translation with discount code 05WIT25 now through September 15, 2025.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez is in love. He is in love with a girl, with a city, and with Persian poetry. Despite his enmity with the new and dangerous city leader, the jealousy of his fellow court poets, and the competition for his beloved, Iran's favorite poet remains unbothered. When his wit and charm are not enough to keep him safe in Shiraz, his friends conspire to keep him out of trouble. But their schemes are unsuccessful. Nothing will chase Hafez from this city of wine and roses.

In Pezeshkzad's fictional account, Hafez's life in fourteenth-century Shiraz is a mix of peril and humor. Set in a city that is at once beautiful and cutthroat, the novel includes a cast of historical figures to illuminate this elusive poet of the Persian literary tradition. Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins's translation brings the beloved poetry of Hafez alive for an English audience and reacquaints readers with the comic wit and original storytelling of Pezeshkzad.

Iraj Pezeshkzad was born in Tehran in 1928 and educated in Iran and then France, where he received his law degree. He was a retired diplomat, journalist, and writer. He was the author of several plays, short stories, and novels, including My Uncle Napoleon. He died on 12 January 2022 in Los Angeles.

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is senior lecturer of Persian language and linguistics at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University.

Patricia J. Higgins is a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emerita at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.

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My Review: First, read this:

He agrees with everyone's opinion, from black to white. With his constant refrain, "We are all children of this land," he recognizes both sides: he who believes it is night, and he who believes it is day.
–and–
"O light of my eyes, don't forget that until a few months ago you and I were among the court favorites of the then-shah. If some of these 'many' {whom Hafez claims will hide him from pursuit} enjoyed our poetry, it was because the poetry pleased the shah. The power and honor of the shah was behind our poetry. Now our poetry is just poetry. And perhaps in the eyes of these 'many,' it is not even poetry. Perhaps some of the men who praised the poems of Shams al-Din Hafez without hearing them will come to agree with His Honor, the police chief, and consider them dirty."

This seems to me to represent the tone and tenor of the book's translation...I think it also gives a flavor of the world in which we're spending a few hours. The court of an insecure, unworthy ruler, whose jobs are done for him not by workers or even lackeys, but by henchmen, is a fertile place to set a love story. Especially when the lovers are unable to come together because the obstacle to them getting their love consummated is one of the aforementioned henchmen.

Our narrator, Mohammad Golandam, is Hafez's brother-in-law and long-time best friend. He's a sensible sort; we can not say the same for Shams al-Din...he who will become, in the fullness of time, Hafez; the two men are only twenty-three at the time of this story. It's easy to see why Golandam, as Hafez (let's use his famous, and short, handle from here on) addresses him, is anxious and on needles and pins. Hafez has made many a sarcastic, cutting remark in his poetry about the new power-wielder Mobarez al-Din Mohammad Mozaffar. This self-installed prince is a "...blood-shedding creature of God {who} understands neither literature nor poetry. He is one of those dull-hearted people who, in the words of Shams Qeis Razi, don't 'distinguish between the sound of music and the braying of an ass.' His source of pleasure and happiness is cutting off heads," entirely enough to strike poor Golandam with near-lethal agita given Hafez's indiscreet, but truthful and honest, characterizations of him:

To get his aversion to him off his chest, {Hafez} had used this phrase extremely carelessly in a lyric poem about repentance after a life of drinking and wenching:
The morality officer became a pious sheikh and forgot his debauchery.
It is my story that remained throughout the bazaar.

It's not too hard to imagine a thin-skinned leader whose response to verbal disrespect shown by those less powerful than he is being, um, disproportionate, is it. The problems are, of course, many in a world run by incompetent and malicious people. The story's not complete without wild schemes and convoluted plots and hilarious misinformation campaigns...there are no better stories, in my never-humble opinion, than the ones about True Love Thwarted!

And True Love it very much is. This poem is what Hafez writes for his morning glory Jahan while he was imprisoned by his oft-insulted rival for her affections, and while she was scheming to get him out by pretending to agree to marry his captor, and while Golandam and Hafez's honorary father schemed to get her out of the unwanted marriage and back into Hafez's arms:

I swear on the life of the belovèd that if I could reach my soul,
That would be the least of the gifts to her by her slave.
If my heart was not bound to a strand of her hair,
How would I have been at peace in this dark vessel made of dust?
Your face is like the sun in the sky, unique in the heavens;
If only your heart were a bit more kind.
You said to me, "What is the worth of the dust under her feet,
If the precious life were eternal?"
I wish you would emerge through my door like a beam of light,
That divine fate would shine on my eyes.
The cypress would acknowledge its lowliness compared to her stature
If it had ten tongues like the wild lily.
You wouldn't fall out of tune with Hafez's melody,
If you weren't the companion of the morning songbirds.

Okay, I don't understand one damn word of that, but I know yearning and longing and sheer miserable wretched being-in-loveness when it smacks me across six or seven centuries. There's plenty of this poetical stuff peppered around the story. There are many readers who will see that as a plus; I want, therefore, to be clear that you will be reading a lot of poetry when you read this novel. (And the clever-clogs blog readers will now be recalling my stance on poetry, and looking at this review's star rating, and drawing some brow-knitting conclusions.)

So why am I praising this book, this poetry-laden book about a poet in love with a woman? Because it's such a delight to read. Because Hafez, every time someone talks sense to him, says "mm hmm" and carries right on being In Love with Jahan and acting as if by sheer force of his will, backed by the spiritual power generated by the huge dynamo of his adoration for Jahan, Things Will Come Out Right.

But I won't tell you if they do or they don't because some things you need to find out for yourownself.

The book concludes with a Dramatis Personae, and a Glossary; both are very handy. The Dramatis Personae include markers for characters based on historical personages, meaning those not marked are invented; though the names and actions of historical people are used, they're probably all best seen as fictional. It's worth noting that, even though Hafez's love object in this story is Jahan, a woman, there's no way in Farsi or in Persian poetry's conventions for that to be certain. It's a feature of the language that pronouns aren't gendered. While Hafez is in love with a woman in twenty-first century Iran, there's absolutely no reason for that to be the case in fourteenth-century Shiraz. I merely note this fact, quite firmly stated by the translators, as a datum of some interest to some readers.