Iranian President claims that the (Jewish) Holocaust was a staged production, or a trick myth that has been perpetuated on the gullible ‘us’ in order to grab land in the Middle East by the evil Zionists. Elsewhere Kafka dreams up Mr. Samsa, who in turn dreams that he has become a bug. And somewhere else, self was playing hooky by indulging in aimless reading after a few months of reading diet restricted to mainly business and financial press.

This is not to say that the financial press can’t be fascinating in a morbid anthropological/ sociological fashion. A case in point is an article last week in the Wall Street Journal on the growth of cosmetic surgery that deals with re-virgin-izing (by reattaching hymens) and vagina tightening in these United States (also a subject that was covered with great wit, from an Iranian context by Marjane Strapi in her “Embroideries”; a quote from memory: the penis is visually, in a manner of speaking, not a very aesthetic), or from today’s WSJ issue, an article on the shopping habits of the natives ($600 Louis Vitton purses or bags for teenage girls anybody?). But I shouldn’t digress too much from my unstated aim of summarizing a few recent wanderings in the labyrinths of books.

Let me begin with Primo Levi’s memoir ‘The Reawakening’, a book that I have successfully managed to prosecute till the end; a task that seems to be harder with the advent of this PADD (print attention deficit disorder) I seemed to have picked up somewhere. In this book Primo Levi traces his journey back to Italy from the lagers of Auschwitz with great humor and style. There is great joy in this book – one can feel Primo Levi reawakening to the world from the Nazi nightmares to which he had been consigned, and from which he was just liberated from. I discovered Primo Levi when I accidentally stumbled upon his ‘The Monkey’s Wrench’ in a second hand bookstore, and have since with great delight consumed his other work. Also if they are not banned in Iran, I would suggest that someone give Mr. Ahmadinejad, Levi’s ‘Survival in Auschwitz’ for edification.

Passing on to other books, Alison Wearing’s ‘Honeymoon in Purdah’ was a half good half bad travelogue, recounting her adventures with her gay roommate in Iran. She is good when is she deals with the comedy of manners that arise in the course of her interactions with crazy Iranians (who seem to have an overwhelming tendency to force feed guests as they take them on serendipitous wild goose chases), as well as her attempts to impose her will on the hejab and the chador (the regulation clothing for women) as they seem to develop minds of their own. However, she is off the mark (i.e., I committed violence on the book) when she waxes self-indulgently, in half New Age-ish monologues like this one:

“My hands run against the sun cracked walls, grainy and thirsty for the oils of living skin. My tongue glides along the curves of the doorways, arches that chrunch against my lips and let me taste sand seeped in centuries. My eyes sink into the color of these ruins and become terra cotta beads, smooth and hard against my eyelids when I blink.”

I am now lazy, so here is a list of other books which are in the chewing pipeline (i.e., books I have begun, and which may be finished tomorrow, next week, next year or never) for the holidays:

Jorge Luis Borges – “Seven Nights” & “Labyrinths” & “In Praise of Darkness” Eva Hoffman – “Lost in Translation” Robin Wright – ‘The Last Great Revolution – Turmoil & Transformation In Iran’ Carlos Drummond de Andrade – ‘Traveling in the Family – Selected Poems’ Jose Saramago – ‘The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis’ Abraham Eraly – ‘The Mughal Throne’

Pehw! Have I opened so many cans! I think it is best not to even open the box of twenty or so volumes I had hauled in over this weekend from a book sale!

This was an excellent and long essay on the current surreal state of Iran (one of my many pet fetishes):

www.nybooks.com

In the past week to further my fetish for all things Persian – I prefer the term Persia to Iran with its connotation and derivation from that racial term ‘Aryan’ – I happened to read through two books on Iran.

The first was Marjane Starapi’s comic book titled ‘Embroideries’, dealing with the subject of sexuality in (I should add or qualify this may be limited to her specific social class, which is generally prosperous, and can be called the aristocratic or upper class) of Iranian women, told as a multi generational after lunch gossip session. While the subject matter of this book wasn’t as broad or deep as her coming of age tales, she brilliantly unfolded in her two previous books “Persipolis - 1 & 2”, I nevertheless found the subject matter to be fascinating and revelatory.

Most of the women, starting from the grandmother to the aunts she portrays in the book come off as deeply subversive of the social and sexual roles imposed on them by the society. In the most dazzling funny passages, these women in black and white line drawings tell stories of how they attempted to fake the virginity test expected of a bride by the society (suggestion: cut your thigh with a razor blade as you shout loudly or as it panned on in the dark, cut the pig’s penis) or debate on how the role of mistress is more cushy and desirable than that of a wife. Also a reader can’t but love a book, even though the reader happens to be male, for pronouncements such as this: ‘a penis, generally speaking, is not a very photogenic object’

The second and more detailed book I finished reading was a memoir of Iran by Christopher de Bellaigue called ‘In The Rose Garden of The Martyrs’. Mr. de Bellaigue, or Reza Ingilisi as he calls himself in Persian, is an Englishman who lives in Tehran, married to a Tehrani, and writes for various publications in the west including the New Yorker of the Great Satan, i.e., Khomeini’s U.S.A.

This book is primarily a one person’s historical examination of Iran, après Islamic Revolution of 1978 (the year I arrived, praise be to both Allah and Devil!) ending in the Axis of Evil Iran of 2002. To do this Reza Ingilisi makes friends with men who were Islamic revolutionaries who kicked out the Shah, overran the nest of spies, i.e., the American Embassy in Tehran; Basijis or Holy Warriors who fought Saddam’s Iraq for eight long years, endured horrific conditions including what in ‘the present shadow of the future’ (to use Condi Rice’s Orwellian characterization of terror threats. Who said the Chosen One’s administration is linguistically challenged!) we better know as WMDs, i.e., biological agents like nerve gas (Was Mr. Rusmfeld shaking Uncle Saddam’s hand in congratulations on his well photographed visit to Baghdad in the 1980s for such daring and cunning in using WMDs, supposedly made in German constructed ‘pesticide’ factories, against the mad ayatollahs, I wonder); thick necks or toughs of South Tehran’s bazaars; dissidents, victims, and justice seeking next of kin of those murdered in the gulags of the Islamic state’s intelligence agencies; and even a stray black American Muslim who had bought into the Islamic revolution.

From such stalking, Reza Ingilisi does a nice job of constructing narrative threads that detail the history and the disaster of the twenty years of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, as well as maps the growing disillusionment with it as like all revolutions it degenerates into a free for all struggle for power and wealth. However what goes missing notably from such a weaving oral history into memoir is a notable absence of young voices, given that the Iranian electorate has a significant number of them, as well as the voices of Iranian women.

Given the imposition of Islamic codes, which happen to tilt power towards a patriarchy, on women, perhaps they haven’t been able to occupy the same historical stage as the men R.I covers in his books. Also his being male might have also prevented him from getting access to women who don’t belong to his circle of acquaintances. The absence of young political activists and actors however is harder to explain. Perhaps given that Islamic Democracy is really a joke (an unelected body deciding who can or cannot stand for elections; as a consolation however these are better than the one candidate elections in the dead Soviet Union, one can at least chose which brand of mullah one wants to sit on top of their heads) and that most power had now devolved into the hands of the true believers of the revolutionary dogma, even more so after the ‘election’ of a Khatemi acolyte as the president this past year, such an absence can be justified.

Well I guess I must wait till another memoir from someone inside comes out or write one myself by sneaking into Iran. I wonder if I, a kafir or non-believer, would have to pay jazaria that Islamic tax imposed on kafirs should I attempt to do that. Also since R.I reports the haughtiness of Iranians (their breath smells better than any one else’s), would I be able to endure the same? Ah. Questions. Questions.