Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is a renowned Iranian author with a unique voice. He was born in a rural area and has only an elementary school education, making him very different from his Western-educated, urban counterparts. His language is rich with influences from traditional Persian poetry, and he purposefully avoids using Arab loan words. In an effort to capture this effect, Tom Patterdale avoided Latinate words in favor of the Anglo-Saxon as much as possible in his translation. Patterdale also wrote a very helpful afterword and extensive notes, because there are a lot of historical figures and cultural references which a non-Iranian might miss.

The book opens with "the colonel" sitting in his dark house waiting for the knock at the gate that he knows is coming. As he nervously smokes and watches the rain run down the window, he begins to reflect on how he ended up here, with his oldest son going mad from the torture he sustained at the hands of the Shah's police, one son dead since the early days of the revolution, another away at the Iraqi front, and his 14-year-old daughter missing. Throughout the next day, the present melts into the past, both the colonel's and his eldest son's, as well as the historical past.

In his novel, Dowlatabadi is critical of the Shah and the foreign powers that propped him up as well as the Islamic revolution. Generations are sacrificed to professed ideals that all end in corruption and death. Needless to say, the book has never been published in Iran (or in Persian), but the author remains free and is a proponent of artistic freedom in Iran. I highly recommend this difficult, but rewarding, novel to anyone interested in Iran. ( )

This summer the Iranian government issued a postage stamp on the novelist Dowlatabadi’s 74th birthday commemorating his lifetime of work. Despite the regime’s professed respect for the art of the novelist, Dowlatabadi’s The Colonel is still not published in his own country. It was first published in Germany, where it was shortlisted for the 2009 Haus der Kulturen Berlin International Literary Award. After publication in Britain, the novel was longlisted for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize and it won the 2013 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature based in Switzerland.

This novel was begun by Dowlatabadi in the 1980’s and periodically added to and amended until the author declared it ready for publication in 2008. It relates the story of a man, a military man of discipline and principles, who appears torn asunder by the change sweeping his country and his family in light of the 1979 revolution against the Shah which was the end of a 2,500-year history of monarchies. His wife is dead by his own hand for her adultery, and three of his children have been killed, two for their anti-Islamic tendencies, and one as a martyr for the cause of the new Islamic state under Khomeini. Two children remain, but the eldest son is sunk in an unresponsive nihilism as a result of the failure of the Communist faction he supported, and his daughter Farzaneh is married to an opportunist who shifts his allegiances with the changing political leadership.

One of Dowlatabadi’s great skills as a novelist is reputedly to use language in an earthy yet lyrical way. We cannot enjoy the original Persian, but we can see the straightforward way in which he draws his characters, exposing their weaknesses and failures while at the same time acknowledging that one could not have done differently.

"The colonel had always let his children find their own way in life...But now he could not help but wonder whether the dreadful fate that had overtaken every one of his children was in fact due to his laissez-faire approach. But no, this did not really provide the old man with an easy answer, either. He firmly believed that he had bequeathed to his children only the most natural of rights, namely the right to determine what they wanted to do with their lives...In the end, perhaps the colonel's wish that his children lead independent lives was a reaction on his part against a life which he felt had been imposed upon him. He felt that he had been short-changed by never having had the freedom to live his own life. This made him feel like some sort of cripple...At least one of you should look out for himself. It's not as though you were carrying the weight of all history on your shoulders! I'm not as strong as you think I am. That's what he really wanted to tell his children."

Dowlatabadi describes an interrogation session, torture, and what jail is like. He describes the total confusion and uncertainty among family members and the general populace for years after the revolution when the political winds shifted to and fro. He describes the agony of a parent who is despised by his children and who has to bury his tortured 14-year-old daughter on a rainy night without help from his family. He describes the guilt and desperation of educated and serious patriots who no longer believed in god or goodness as a result of what they have seen and how their understanding of their most basic rights as humans felt violated. Even though I have not had much opportunity to read Persian literature, there can be little doubt about how such an open and painful account of despair would be received by a sitting government.

"The colonel felt guilt, too--guilty for the very existence of his children, or lack of it, as the case may be."

Apparently the present government in Iran would be willing to publish this novel in Persian if the author would make some changes, which he has refused to do. And yet, for his other work which is widely hailed in Iran as unique and masterful, Dowlatabadi is respected and honored by the postage stamp in his honor.

"One would think that boys were born coy, but there lurks within them a dreadful, perverse force that can, in the blink of an eye, turn them into savage beasts, beasts that since the beginning of history have been easily drawn into committing the most appalling of crimes, just to prove themselves. They follow orders to the letter and call what they do acts of heroism. Can we blame them? What about us, the people who send these unformed lumps of soft putty out onto the street, where they fall into the arms of the first merchants of villainy they come across? And we just sit back and wait for them to be turned into rods to beat our own backs..."

This book is an important addition to the literature coming from the Middle East, and one hopes that one will never have read its like again.



( )

This powerful novel is set in a town in Iran in the late 1980s, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and roughly a decade after the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the accession to power of Islamic fundamentalists, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The main character is 'the colonel', an unnamed disgraced former member of the Shah's army, who is so named because of his former title, but also because he reveres Mohammad-Taqi Khan Pesyan, or 'The Colonel', who is considered to be a hero by Iranian secular nationalists (but not Islamic fundamentalists) because of his sacrifice in attempting to free the country from foreign influences in the early 20th century. the colonel frequently speaks to and confides in the portrait of The Colonel in his home, as he lives in fear of what will happen to him, to his children who are missing under separate circumstances, and to his eldest son Amir, who refuses to emerge from the basement and seems to be descending into madness.

On a rainy night two young police officers come to the colonel's door, to inform him that he is wanted by the local prosecutor. He follows them, and receives tragic news: his youngest daughter, who is not yet 14, has been murdered. He and the two policemen proceed to the local mortuary to claim the body, as it must be washed and buried before the dawn call to prayers.

The night, like the rainfall, is seemingly unending. the colonel is plagued by fear and uncertainty, as he recalls and regrets his past actions and decisions, while reality merges into often nightmarish scenarios that make him question his own sanity. The lives of his children, his wife, a roguish son-in-law, and an 'immortal' former intelligence officer of the deposed Shah's feared secret police are weaved throughout the novel, along with frequent references to important figures throughout Iranian history. The individual stories merge in the manner of a tornado that forms and strengthens, as chaos and a foreboding sense of doom becomes ever present.

The Colonel was published in 2008, after Dowlatabadi had worked on it for 25 years, and it has been published worldwide to critical acclaim. However, it remains in the hands of censors in Iran, as the author, who still lives in Teheran, continues to refuse to allow it to be edited to meet the demands of the current regime. It is a beautifully written but challenging read, due to its references to Persian history, although the translator, Tom Patterdale, does a superb job in providing brief footnotes throughout the book, along with an excellent afterword and glossary that is invaluable to the average reader. My comments don't do justice to the complexity and richness of this superb and highly instructive novel about a country that is important to the Western world, but one that continues to be a worrisome enigma to most of us. ( )

Ostensively, this is a tale about one family, but it's really an epic narrative about Iran and the way its recent past carries echoes of its older legends. At times hallucinatory, the story contains nightmares, multiple viewpoints, and the inner dialogue of two men who have seen and experienced too much. I wish that the 'Afterword' had been a 'Forward' as I would have understood what was going on much better. Similarly, if I was more familiar with Iranian history, I am sure that I would have had an even greater appreciation for the book. As it was, I kept having to interrupt my reading to consult the endnotes. Nevertheless, it is a breathtaking book. ( )

My first M. Dowlatabadi book was Missing Soluch, a very vivid, human story of poverty, hunger, strong minded women in 1940's rural Iran. This book is a nightmare. It feel and reads like a nightmare, confusing, disturbing, hard to take, impossible to escape. It is very vivid, very sad, gives you a feeling for torture and black hole prisons, and may be best read in bits when you are feeling strong and happy. It can drown you and leave you feeling very very bad yourself. I recommend, if only to appreciate why torture is immoral, criminal, and corrosive to humanity on all sides. It is powerful writing, like James Joyce, but should be taken in small doses. ( )