Seasons of Purgatory

October 15, 2021
Across this startling, unnerving, and haunting collection, Mandanipour (Moon Brow, 2018) explores the many traumas of recent Iranian history. ""Shadows of the Cave"" portrays a man still haunted by the coup of 1953 and expecting worse to come. This is representative of a feeling that each tale evokes as characters sense that the horror they have experienced will be followed by more hardships. Garc�a M�rquez-like magical realism permeates every corner, with animals as key figures. A family is relentlessly haunted by a viper in the glorious parable, "Mummy and Honey," and a mysterious dog is central to the fascinatingly propulsive "Shatter the Stone Tooth." The title story represents the everyday horrors of the Iran-Iraq war, and trauma appears on nearly every page, as in the beautifully haunting ""King of the Graveyard"" and the tragic death of a child in ""If She Has No Coffin."" Dostoyevskian in their density and black humor, Mandanipour's stories capture the Iranian experience of constant upheaval in a brilliant translation that allows the English-speaking world to experience this gem of Iranian literature.

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November 15, 2021
Iranian writer Mandanipour delivers a series of stories that are alternately spectral and somber but altogether subversive. In the opening story, "Shadows of the Cave," a widower quietly defies the new Iranian theocracy by wearing a dark suit and tie, "which since the revolution has been considered 'the leash of civilization' and is unofficially banned," in order to visit his wife's grave in a cemetery now crowded with victims of the mullahs. He defies the censorial dictates of the regime as well, keeping a large private library, nursing memories of a long-ago post before the shah's coup d'�tat of 1953. The library--and this is the crux--focuses on animals, with which Mr. Farvaneh has a philosophical obsession: "At times," he intones, "their indifference to humans is truly insulting." In the title story, Iran's war with Iraq provides a scenario in which endless suffering breeds just that indifference to other humans, as a wounded Iraqi in no-man's land eventually disintegrates against an exposed hillside. Remarks the Iranian narrator, "One day, we noticed that his lips had decomposed--it was the worms' doing--his long teeth were exposed; he looked like he was laughing. Late one night, an animal ripped off his arm and took it away, but he didn't fall." Nasser, the doomed Iraqi soldier, is a drag on morale on both sides, but there's nothing anyone can do until finally an officer, driven nearly mad by combat, erases his presence with a rocket. In "Seven Captains," speaking to current headlines, another soldier gloomily remarks of the power plant he's guarding, "There's talk that the Westerners have said they'll bomb it. If they do, people say we'll all die....Do you think they're right?" Death comes in many forms in stories marked by symbolic animals: fish, worms, cuckoos, cowering dogs, snakes that hide among "the arabesque motif on the carpet," everywhere they can trouble the dreams of struggling humans. A skilled storyteller with a bent for the quietly macabre and the burdens of those crushed by totalitarian rule.

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Starred review from November 15, 2021
Mandanipour (Moon Brown) skillfully fuses the poetic and the brutal in this complex and intense collection. The care and humanity of his voice adds poignancy to plots anchored by violence. Many of the stories feature animals: an elusive leopard is at the center of “The Color of Midday Fire,” about a deep friendship rooted in war. In “Shadows of the Cave,” the mysterious baker Mr. Farvaneh declares that “man became man when he withdrew from the animal kingdom”; and the shadow of vicious stray dogs haunts the narrator of “Seven Captains.” While the turmoil and danger of everyday life in Iran are the backdrop, Mandanipour focuses on the personal struggles of the characters and their hardscrabble lives. The harrowing title story charts the slow disintegration of a man wounded in battle, who seems oblivious to the activity around him. These haunting, urgent works are as nuanced and provocative as the lives they depict, and they defy easy categorization and neat takeaways, as reflected in an enigma offered up by the narrator of “Shadows of the Cave,” first published in 1985: “Meanings, often contrary to common perception, are the image of their own meaninglessness.” Prolific in Iran though relatively new to U.S. readers, this author deserves greater attention. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc.

Starred review from March 1, 2022

In exile from Iran, where his books are banned, Mandanipour--author most recently of the LJ best-booked Moon Brow--delivers a scorchingly beautiful collection in elegant, icepick-sharp prose. A father demands that his three sons uphold tradition after their grandfather's death and return to live in the ancestral home, where a golden-scaled viper ultimately reigns. A girl named Dorna accuses her parents of causing the death of her daring older sister even as her father lectures her that she's loved because she's obedient. A badly injured soldier survives for days in an unreachable no-man's land, his cries and finally his corpse becoming the central focus of his comrades. War and revolution are a given, but generally they are less focus than relentless implication. Walking to the cemetery, Dorna and her father are briefly waylaid by a bombing, while readers learn almost in passing that cantankerous Mr. Farvaneh, forever inveighing again animals, returned home a changed man after incarceration at the time of the coup d'�tat. VERDICT With understated power, Mandanipour limns characters in acute situations, delivering a deep understanding of the human condition. Highly recommended.

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