I’m Not Doing Formal Book Reviews Anymore

People ask me sometimes why I don’t do more formal book review anymore. To be honest, it’s just too much trouble anymore. I don’t have a career in literary academia and the places to put reviews outside of that narrow world are getting pretty scarce anymore. People just don’t seem interested in them anymore. Even beyond that, it’s just getting to be way more hassle than I’m willing to spend. I always note something about what I read on Goodreads and Amazon, but anything more is really getting to be more effort than I want to spend. I mean, once of the last ones I agreed to do didn’t even get looked at for around three months. That’s cool and normally I’m one of the more chill people about this, but you can’t expect I’m going to remember as much of the book by then and really be able to do much with it at that point. By then I’m typically 45-60 books subsequent. I just won’t remember. Regardless, that one I mentioned had a comment or two, which were reasonable. They mentioned the attention the book had gotten and how they wanted to know if I might be amenable to a few other changes so the review could be up there with the other stuff they had seen. Fine and all, and I said so. Not every review is as good as every other and perhaps this one had fallen down somewhere. I waited to hear…but then the didn’t get back to me at all until about a year and a half later when I finally bothered them again. They just mentioned revision at that point with no specific comments, mentioning other existing coverage and saying I could try it elsewhere. Who would even be interested in a review that old? I certainly wasn’t. I’m just not going to go through that much effort for no real reason when no one even on the review publication side seems to care. It seems like the authors are the only ones (sometimes) reading reviews anymore.

I’ll just put it up here. It’s got to go out somewhere since I got a review copy. I just don’t feel like bothering with the formal review site hassle anymore:

 

Moon Brow by Shahriar Mandanipour

Having been born in the mid seventies, I tend to think of anything written about Iran as either for or against the United States. That approach is certainly United States-focused, whether the approach relates to the good or bad, but given the amount of meddling, it is definitely hard to ignore. However, the United States is far from the only influence on Iran. There are thousands of years of Islamic influence, even more thousands of Persian history, and uncountable individual human influences on the destinies tied to that nation. We fool ourselves when we think the stories will always be about us, and as much as Moon Brow by Shahriar Mandanipour involves pro and con sides of the Islamic Revolution, this is not a story that is particularly concerned with the United States.

Amir Yamini was a young playboy fully involved in the excesses prior to the Islamic Revolution in Iran. By the time of in the novel however, something has happened. Due to events in the past, he snuck away from his rich and pious family to fight in the war against Iraq. His family claimed him from a mental hospital, without an arm and much of his memory. He is treated as a hero at the same time that he is regarded as unstable and unable to care for himself:

It is the first time he has come this close to the garden gates. One of the guards walks out of the guardroom. Dressed in the green of the Revolutionary Guard uniform and wearing a smile buried under a bushy beard, he says hello. And receives no reply.

“I have not had the honor of meeting Agha Haji’s son.”

“Have you had it now?”

“Of course, sir. You living martyrs are the light and soul of Imam Khomeini and the revolution. I smell the perfume of the battlefield on you.”

***

The guard’s polite and gentle demeanor changes.

“Agha Haji has given strict order that you are not to gou out. Get it? Go back to your room.

Most importantly to him, Amir is haunted by dreams of a woman whose face he cannot recall:

“I remember! There was a jewelry shop. We bought a pair of rings. When we walked out, there was the sound of laughter all around us. Mocking us. I said to her, “Let’s leave. Let’s go someplace beautiful where we can be alone. Someplace where no one will see how beautifully we can put rings on each other’s fingers.’ She agreed to be my fiancée, but she said she couldn’t war the ring…. The glitter of the gold was so intense that her face w all a shimmer, or perhaps my eyes were blinded by the glow. I said, ‘Every night we will take off our rings and every morning we will put them back on each other’s fingers so that our engagement will be renewed every day…a hundred thousand times, maybe even more….’

 

No one seems to be able to tell him of the girl. Does she exist? Had he hidden her? Does she still live? What is he to do? How is he to find her?

 

Throughout the course of the novel, things turn out to be much more than pro or con Islamic Revolution. There are the excesses in Iran that led to the revolution, the overreaction of the revolution, the war between neighboring countries, and many more things that the people had to deal with while attempting to live their lives. At the core of it all is a single human person who has been through tremendously overwhelming things, some of his own creation and fault, and must face things just as overwhelming in order to still be alive.

 

War, religion, family, all of that is important. It impacts a great deal. At the same time, it is just the context in which one person is living and struggles to have that continue in a way that means something. Far more than Iran, the Islamic republic, Iraq, the Shan or any of that, Amir Yamini is a human being with failings who has been failed, who loves and may have been loved. It is involves happenings that are universal to humanity, presented within a very specific and historical context.

 

Moon Brow presents a rich story and a great deal to turn over in the mind. There is more to consider as the pages stack up, and it consistently evades the easy expectation in favor of the more complex and more human. At the same time that it is something different, it strikes far closer to home than I would have imagined and resonates more deeply. I will be continuing to think about this book for quite a while.

 

 

Recommendations:

– The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

– Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

– Imajica, Clive Barker

– Together Tea, Marjan Kamali

– The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway