The Valleys of the Assassins

For those of us who remember 1989, 2009 in Iran is eerily reminiscent. The only question is whether it's going to be the Velvet Revolution of late 1989 which freed Eastern Europe from Communism or whether its going to be June 1989 when the Chinese government crushed a pro democracy movement in Beijing by murdering hundreds of students in Tianamen Square. I don't know which way Iran is going to go, but this has clearly become a huge story. Andrew Sullivan has been posting live twitter feeds from Tehran and raw photo images from the AP and Getty. The BBC is starting to cover this a bit more (their Farsi service, apparently has been excellent) and CNN has now woken up to the enormity of these events. I am not a political blogger, it's not my bag at all, and if I was to blog about things which are of interest to me willy nilly then there would be a lot of tedious posts here about rugby, baseball and beer. I like the discipline of keeping this blog vaguely in the realm of the arts, especially books and films, so in the spirit of that, I'd like to briefly mention two more Iranian books that I've read that might give you an insight into Persian culture and identity: First, Shahrnush Parsipur's lovely collection of stories Women Without Men (nice nod to Hemingway in the title) and second Freya Stark's monumental The Valleys of the Assassins where the indomitable Miss Stark sets out to find the Old Man of the Mountains and the cult of assassins in 1930's Persia. Parsipur is a miniaturist whose observations on Iranian life and identity are precise and eloquent. Freya Stark (1893 - 1993!) is one of the greatest travel writers of all time, undaunted by threats of delay, disease and death, she went wherever she wanted and did exactly as she pleased right up to the end of her long life - they just don't make 'em like that anymore, more's the pity. (BTW the reason this post is green comes from a twitter idea in Iran, to show solidarity with the Green Revolution.)

Persepolis

In 1999 in the basement of a mosque in Cairo I was a little surprised to find the tomb of the last Shah of Iran. There were no other tourists, no pilgrims, no angry vandals - the Shah had been forgotten about. It was a little bit like this today too with the election in Iran. If you have been following the events taking place in Tehran then you probably haven't been watching BBC World, CNN, MSNBC or, God save us, Fox. MSNBC has been telling us about America's toughest prisons, the BBC seems obssessed by Ronaldo, CNN loves the story of the pretty American girl in Italy accused of murder and Fox believes the biggest challenge facing the globe is how Miss California can get her title back. I suspect the news divisions of these networks go to their holiday homes on Saturday and Sunday, because my read of the situation in Iran is that something pretty extraordinary happened over the weekend. Was an election stolen? Was there a military coup? I don't really know but it certainly merits further investigation. I do know that there is an entire generation of sophisticated, intelligent, disillusioned Iranians out there and I know this because of two brilliant books: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azir Nafisi and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.
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Both books are memoirs by women who grew up in post Revolution Iran. Reading Lolita is a very interesting attempt to carve out a cultural identity in an extremely oppressive environment. Persepolis is an account of a girl's migration from Iran to France told in comic book form. Persepolis is a little better known than Lolita because it was turned into a film in 2007 - the film's not bad but I still prefer the book, which is haunting, moving and beautiful and one of the best things I read in 2006. If you want an inkling of what might be happening on the streets of Tehran at the moment switch off "America's Toughest Prisons" and have a gander at either of these two wonderful books instead.

The Kvetcher in the Rye

JD Salinger surfaced yesterday to stop the release of a novel in Britain and the US which the publishers call "a sequel to Catcher in the Rye." Salinger's lawyers call the book a "rip off pure and simple" and although the publishers are trying to say that the work is more of an homage than a rip off, it looks to me like the book is in violation of every copyright convention out there as it uses characters and situations from Catcher. The author apparently lives in Sweden but goes under the nom de plume John David California, which makes me think that he is in fact Swedish, I don't see an American picking that pen name and very few novelists choose Scandinavia as a good tax haven. The BBC has a bit more on the story here, but what's interesting to me is the fact that JDS is still alive, kicking and angry up in his somewhat isolated (though I drove past it once) home in Vermont. He hasn't published a novel for 57 years and many people wonder what he's been doing all this time. There are two schools of thought. The first is that rather like Harper Lee, he knew he couldn't top himself after Catcher in the Rye so he hasn't written anything. And it is true that he meditates a lot and watches a fair bit of daytime TV. But I prefer the second theory. In her memoir Dream Catcher, JD's daughter Margaret says that Salinger would write every single morning and occasionally he would show her manuscripts of completed novels. Supposedly these manuscripts are in a bank vault in Cornish, Vermont to be published after Salinger's death. Since Catcher is one of the funniest novels I've ever read I'm intrigued and excited by this possibility though of course I do wish Mr Salinger, who is 90 years old, a good few years yet. Tomorrow, incidentally, is D Day and Salinger is a D Day veteran. A platoon sergeant who fought with his troops throughout the Normandy campaign, he took part in the capture of Paris and had a drink with Ernest Hemingway (who had read some of his short stories) in the freshly liberated bar of the Ritz Hotel; I really hope, in a bank vault somewhere, there's a piece JD's written about that.