trans(re)lating house one

by Poupeh Missaghi

In the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election, a woman undertakes a search for the statues disappearing from Tehran’s public spaces. A chance meeting alters her trajectory, and the space between fiction and reality narrows. As she circles the city’s points of connection―teahouses, buses, galleries, hookah bars―her many questions are distilled into one: How do we translate loss into language? Melding several worlds, perspectives, and narrative styles, trans(re)lating house one translates the various realities of Tehran and its inhabitants into the realm of art, helping us remember them anew.

Genres: Fiction, Iran, Historical Fiction, Novels, Middle East, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2020

Reviews

[Chris Via]

Only dreams cannot be erased.

Video now available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weRT0...

[Charlie Quimby · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one is likely to mistake trans(re)lating house one as a beach read. Look at the title, the cover, scan the inner pages. Is it really a novel or meta-fictional tract, a mystery, a dream journal, a political statement, a meditation on disappearance, on art, on rendering accounts of experience and observation? Some sort of catechism with the questions laid out but the answers not provided in the same order? A graduate thesis? A city guide?

Don't be put off.

It's provocative in a way that demands a reader's willingness to be caught in unfamiliar territory. I generally don't care for demanding fiction this many years past my literature classes, but this novel rewarded my attention. Its mysteries and obscurities began to make sense—not in the way a crime novel resolves the puzzle as you near the end but as a spiritual quandary clarifies itself after you accept it instead of struggling. Or as a city becomes yours from living in it.

Such layers and complexity make a book blurb-resistant; trans(re)lating house one is worthy of a full review. But I've put off the task too long now to do it justice.

Finishing the novel one night in the throes of the uneasy COVID-19 spring, I sifted it through my dreams and woke liking it even better. I went back to the first page and was drawn again through the story, connecting more dots, seeing more depths, appreciating the author's workmanship...

Consider this muddle of reactions an endorsement.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyG9J...

[Justine · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I make her keep looking for the bronze bodies while these bodies of flesh and blood begin to become their own statues in the landscape of my soul.
They lost their lives on the same streets I was on, at the same time.
Seeking their material now in the labyrinths of the virtual world, I have resurrected them into words only to confine them anew within other tombstones, this time on the page, between the covers of a book, not even in their own language.”

Poupeh Missaghi’s trans(re)lating house one is a book of loss, grief, art, and love in the face of horror and corruption. It begins as a search for statues disappearing from Tehran’s public spaces in the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election and subsequent protests. But more so, it’s about the individuals and lives lost, their deaths and the mysteries surrounding many of their deaths leaving voids in people’s lives. Then again, it’s also about dreams and language, a book of questions, and the understanding that answers “will suffer illusions of grandeur, will mimic the very forces it has set to expose and oppose”. And Missaghi does this through a kaleidoscope of genres—fiction, metafiction, dreams, quotes from Bolaño and Cixous, a city guide to Tehran. To be honest, I don’t really know how to talk about it, let alone review it, all I know is that it was beautiful.


“I want it to make you stumble. I want you to be disrupted when you arrive here, feel some discomfort, feel out of place.... I want to acknowledge the Otherness of both the territory and the language to you, make them visible, and celebrate them as I translate the city and its people into this other language of mine.”

“How can these stories restore our faith in our ability to rise beyond the oppressor, in our ability to create different realities?”
“Do the wounds of their bodies and ours heal within the frame of a book that promises to hold onto the scars?”
“A woman's language. Spiral. Sprawling. Moving in and out.
Meandering toward and away. Breathing in and breathing out.”

4.25-4.5*

[Julie Capell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was riveted from the very beginning of this unclassifiable work. Part fiction, part journalism, part essay, and slipping between these from page to page, the only thing I can sort of compare it to is Bolaño's 2666. It's amazing how, even though the book is set in Tehran in 2009, the issues are extremely applicable to the United States in 2021. Questions like how can we know what is true and what is false, how can ordinary life go on when atrocities are happening all around us. how can we make sure we remember our own history?

Translators, in particular, will be fascinated with the way the author interrogates the process of writing. For even though the book was not translated--it was not first written in Farsi and then translated into English (the author was born in Tehran but lives now in the United States, and she wrote the book in English)--it deals over and over with questions that normally only translators think about. How do we choose what stories to tell? Who gets to choose which stories get told? What is lost and what is gained when something is told in a language other than the one in which the events occurred?

I cannot praise this book enough, it's a truly extraordinary achievement.

[Jaylen Strong · Rating 5 out of 5]

trans(re)lating house one was more than text amongst the page and more than what the confines of genre hybridity can describe. It was a labyrinth of doors that led to realms of rupture, grief, love, disappearances, the horrors of a corrupt state, the power of entering and investigating the life of a dream. This book was about searching and what are we doing in this life if we are not constantly in search.

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beautiful. I have not felt so present to a city since I read If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things more than a decade ago. (The city, it sings.)

This book is difficult. It is the most like The Argonauts I have read, though of course it is also nothing like The Argonauts.

This book is timely. It's about public art and monuments and why they are important and their destruction perhaps more so. It's about protest and violence and what the state can do. It's about people who look in the wrong places for the right things and it's about living in the 21st century in a city that doesn't care about you. It's about loss that is personal and political. It's about a dream space between fiction and fact.

This book is a novel. It is also not a novel. It is a collection of moving quotations from important works. It is a treatise on the role of public art. It is a eulogy. It is a historical account. It is a long poem.

I found myself constantly aware of how my eyes were moving across each page, how I'd be drawn in the middle of a long paragraph to read the four words standing alone on the opposite page. In this way, it was a book about my own attention span and how information delivery can disrupt our desire to learn. I found myself feeling one way when the more fictionalized sections (right-justified) were on the left-hand side of a spread and the historical or philosophical sections (left-justified) were on the right-hand side of the spread (the two narrators are in sync) and feeling differently when the sides were flipped (they are disconnected, dissonant). I don't know if this was intentional. I don't think it matters.

This is the book that convinced me to read more independently published books, to think and read what most other people are not thinking or reading. To care for a book not because it is lyrically painted (though this one is) or because it uses emotions delicately (though this one does) but because it is doing something new. Because it is taking me into a different place and asking new questions. Because it is helping me think things and see things I would not think on my own.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a powerful and intentional text, and each formal choice Missaghi makes is tight with meaning. Weaving dreams, found text, free association, and a rigorous battery / of questions for the reader as martyrwitness, she demands that we look into the silences we can’t read. This book is heavily citational and occasionally bogged-down, but I understand the choice to substitute other voices for one’s “own” in an analysis of ambiguous collective grief.

[Maddy Drdak · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book as an exploration of grief, reflection, and a difficult dive into a perspective I had yet to explore. I read this for a class at my university and had the opportunity to experience Poupeh in person as she visited my class to speak on her book as well as read excerpts. She answered many questions and gave an amazing insight into her writing process, symbolism, and novel publishing. It was an honor to hear her speak.

[Babak · Rating 5 out of 5]

An in-depth and honest investigation of collective trauma, disappearance, and erasure in the wake of Iranian 2009 post-election protests. It's a very insightful and complex exploration of loss, meaning of art making at the face of collective trauma, and the role of language. Its formal inventiveness only matched its precision in capturing the complexities of writing about such difficult topic.

[Deb Urbano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emotive. Moving. Questioning.
This poetic account of a woman searching for disappearing statues in 2010's Tehran turns into an account of murdered people. It is purposefully cryptic. I learned about Iranian culture and the feel of a woman moving through the city. I wonder if I could have learned a little more from a straightforward novel in prose.
The bibliography is impressive. Quotes from scholarly articles and books are interwoven throughout to build the factual scaffolding for the story, and to examine why art, dreams, and a book like this might be important.
"Re: the right alignment of the text...This is foreign territory. Its map needs to be foreign. I want it to make you stumble. I want you to be disrupted...feel out of place. The language of the city is Persian. My first language is Persian. Persian is written from right to left."

[Fen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read a lot of contemporary novels like this one. Common parts of the formula include: a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, brutalities narrated in a distant third-person voice, a cast of unnamed "everyman" and "everywoman" type characters, and experimentation with typography. This seems to be a global trend; Human Acts by Han Kang comes to mind, as does Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernandez.

Missaghi says that this story is not the sort conventionally told to a Western audience. She is right. The unnamed woman who is the protagonist of the novel lives a modern, metropolitan life. She uses technology, does drugs, and has sex. It does not mesh with Western media's portrayal of Middle Eastern nations as desolate and backwards. By telling this story, Missaghi erases the lines Westerners like to draw between "us" and "them." She underlines this further by recounting news stories she, now living in the West, sees in Western newspapers about people back home who have (often mysteriously) died.

Missaghi does not only ask questions metaphorically, but literally. One of her most-used narrative techniques is to list questions, for example:

What are the facts of the void inherited? What are its fictions? How much of what is deemed fact is fiction? How much of fiction is fact?

When an event has come to an end and only reverberations remain, can a hard line really be drawn between the two?

What do mausoleums pay homage to? The facts or the fictions of dead figures? What kinds of memories do they conjure? What kinds of stories do they tell?

Cleverly, Missaghi writes the parts of the novel that take place from her point-of-view (i.e., the nonfiction) from left-to-right, but the parts that take place in Iran from right-to-left.

All of this is good. The questions are pressing and ever-relevant to the sociopolitcal issues she discusses. The typographical choice has the functional purpose of indicating which section is from which point-of-view, and the symbolic function of representing Persian when the narrative takes place in Iran.

But, to me, this novel never really transcends "good." The problem with "purposely generic" narratives is they can make for a generic-feeling book; and even though Missaghi asks all the right questions, they never go beyond being good questions due to the generic narrative they are grounded in. Having read books using similar literary devices in the recent past, this book does not stand out to me or particularly speak to me.

[nicole ☾ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so beautiful, that I'm almost ashamed to try to review it. It feels like my own words could never do it any kind of justice. It feels like a sin to try. I'll keep the review shorter than this book deserves for this reason.

This was like reading a tapestry, fiction and nonfiction and poetry all woven together. Missaghi has such a command with words that you feel exactly what she wants you to feel with every single one of her lines. There was one page that was blank except for a single line that made me have to put the book down and come back to it later, because I felt so burdened by it, which makes me feel awful to say because I don't have the relation that Missaghi has with Iran, but it is really a book of burdens. And by a book of burdens, I mean it in the most awe-struck way. She carries around the burdens put on her people--that she is also removed from because of her own physical distance--and seems to hold it out for us to try to feel its weight, and even then, her own hands are still supporting it, keeping us from feeling how heavy it really is, but it still is overwhelming.

This book has you thinking about distance and embodiment. There's a lot of focus on the corporeal and the incorporeal, the dynamic and distance between them, the disconnect from the body being in one location but still feeling bound to another. It focuses on language, the meanings that can only be expressed in Persian, and the ways that translation can muddle not only understanding, but experience. The idea of processing information through language and the body.

I loved this book. It feels like one that needs to be read multiple times, both to understand it better and to immerse yourself in how beautiful Missaghi's prose is.

[Rebecca H.]

This is a novel for readers who like books that ask questions and explore ideas. It follows a woman searching Tehran for missing statues in the aftermath of the 2009 presidential election protests in Iran. She rides buses, visits galleries and teahouses, and meets strangers with important messages for her. Interspersed among sections telling her story are passages where a narrator contemplates the searching woman’s quest and asks questions about memory, documentation, violence, and what we owe the dead. The novel also incorporates passages on these issues from a range of philosophers and writers. It includes accounts of people who lost their lives in the protests. It’s a multi-layered, wide-ranging exploration of how we grapple with loss, how we memorialize the dead, and how we best live our lives.

https://bookriot.com/2020/02/07/febru...

[Rob Forteath · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is in the form of two parallel quests. One is a woman looking into the mystery of disappearing statues in Tehran. She drifts from place to place, finding and losing clues, following people, attending art exhibits, and not achieving much.

The other is a narrator who is documenting the brutal deaths of people during the 2009 Green Movement campaign, along with the widespread official suppression of any information about these deaths. Since it is obvious that this is the main focus of the book, it is difficult for a reader to maintain interest in the parallel quest of the woman looking for statues.

I found the style of the book very interesting, but wished for it to progress in some way. The stories of deaths and official stonewalling become repetitive, although the musings about what it means to tell the stories holds our interest to the end.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Yanara Friedland says of the book, it "proposes a new citizenship of reading, listening, and listening to the city's body," a body that is made up of other bodies...In Missaghi's narrative, these bodies are chiefly corpses and statues. Translating in this book is conceived of in terms of dreams, and (hi)stories of those killed by the state. Missaghi speaks of an "archive of dreams." Trans(re)lating as a continuous act, a process that is never complete. Prominence of questions throughout the book was notable, as well as her incorporation other of scholarly & fictional works. Very inter-textual and meta-literary. The "literary detective" element of this book reminded me of the work that Cristina Rivera Garza does.
Will write more later.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would classify this book as an experimental novel. Incorporating various different formats, POVs, combining historical records of deaths in the wake of the 2009 protest uprisings in Iran, Missaghi tells the story of a woman in Iran who is ostensibly investigating the disappearance of missing statues throughout the city. It is difficult to delve more into the plot as the unconventional style and format are best experienced first hand. I'd recommend this to fans of experimental fiction, those interested in stories that take place in Iran, and fans of Roberto Bolano, as the novel reminded me very much of his writing.

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So heart-wrenching and immersive and real and good; it asks and tries to answer all the difficult and painful questions that I’ve wanted to see considered in a book about Iran under the IR— and does so in a deeply thoughtful, compelling, inventive, and astute way. I’ve never actually written a review on here before but I think this deserves much wider readership than it’s gotten so far, imperfections notwithstanding.

[Christine]

The writing style was interesting but I simply could not engage with this book. I abandoned it at the 30% mark. I'm sure it works for someone, and the subject matter is important, but this book is not for me.

[tina mcallister · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing

Beautiful writing. Opens the mind to new ways of seeing. Should be required reading for all at least once in a lifetime. I know I will read this one again and again.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wildly good piece of collaging experimental writing meditating on our connections to statues and bodies and the violence(s) enacted by the state.

[Max · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author's name is my soggy, poopy? 😭

[Pooneh Yekta · Rating 4 out of 5]

We mourn. We protest. We dance.

[Ingrid · Rating 4 out of 5]

did I "get it"? no. did I enjoy it? yes.

this book is everything I’d imagine an art exhibit would look like in written form. it is a novel, yet not a novel; rather, it’s a collection of passages from other writers, a storyline of a woman searching for missing national monuments, and written records of missing people in a state of political disarray.

[Setareh Jorgensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a creative piece of work. You have to get comfortable with the format. Its different from any other book I’ve ever read. I thought it was intensely innovative. I also, by page 46, found it emotionally difficult to read, in fact the lone sentence on page 46 made me cry. The author writes, “I want to hold a moment of silence here. Out of respect. In memory.” Brilliant! I couldn’t stop reading.

I finished this book in one day! Perhaps my connection to the culture, perhaps my remote connection to the author, perhaps my empathy toward loss, all contributed to my loving this book. I also loved the author’s questions, directives, and guidance throughout the book. This book is thoughtful, engaging, and informative!