CENSORING IRANIAN LOVE STORY

One of the best books I’ve read

Lest you read no further than this line, let me say with feeling: read "Censoring an Iranian Love Story." Read it right away. Obviously, the USA has been patently ambivalent toward all things Iranian for more than thirty years. Just a few years ago, the streets of Iran were embroiled in Twitter-driven uprisings as the West looked on in amazement. Aren't these the people that called for the death of the "Great Satan?"Apparently not."Censoring an Iranian Love Story." is a painfully beautiful book, alive with the author's viable, breathing description of contemporary Iranian life. Author Shahriar Mandanipour has chosen not to write a love story for the ages but has instead, written a heartrending story for the moment (eventually, this book will stand as an important history lesson). The moment in Iran is at once harsh and beautiful, much like the lives of Sara and Dara, central characters of the book. As Mandanipour describes his struggle to rise above the exhaustive, exhausting limitations of state theocracy, readers glimpse intimately, what precisely has gone wrong with the Islamic Revolution and how it jeapordizes the artistic impulse of its citizens. Considering the persistantly artistic impulse of the Iranian nation, this vision affords an abiding sense of tragedy. Mandanipour manages a difficult feat by illuminating conditions within Iranian society without exercising overt criticism.Which is to say that Iranian reality is infinitely more subtle than we have imagined. The central characters of Sara and Dara are highly sympathetic as young adults facing the fierce social restrictions imposed by Iranian law. Dara is an ex-film student and ex-political prisoner whose academic records have been expunged along with his future. Sara is a student of literature with more mettle than those around her suppose. As Mr. Mandanipour explains, the two characters are named after the Iranian counterparts to America's "Dick and Jane" of early reading fame . . . hence they are archetypal. He details the lives of his central characters to show what it means to face an unrelenting, frightening, and strangley officious form of state censorship aimed at the regulation of public and moral behavior. As narrator, the author demonstrates how he deliberately filters word and phrases for indirect meaning in order to move his work past the censor, a wringing task.Just as Sara and Dara disguise the appearance of their romance, the author shows us how he constantly self-censors to avoid the harsher consequences of forthright description, consequences which can lead to imprisonment, professional banishment or much worse. Mandanipour's description of the logistics needed to appease an assigned-for-life-censor, Sara and Dara's efforts to avoid the displeasure of the ubiquitous Iranian Morality Police are unabashedly Orwellian.Forget what you may already "know" about Iranian society and read "Censoring an Iranian Love Story." Whatever cultural references Western readers lack the author graciously explains, often with great charm and humor. "Censoring . . ." has an fairly idiosyncratic style, but is more lively for the author's literary device. Mandanipour clearly loves his country, his people and their truly vast cultural heritage. The book draws a chilling picture of the regime as a hopelessly twisted moral arbiter that imposes its will through self-censorship and intimidation.Most importantly, Sara and Dara are innocent. They are forced to scheme, lie, and break laws so they can drink coffee together, view Western movies or simply look into each other's eyes. Sara and Dara employ subterfuge to pursue the kind of normal attraction that college age anywhere typiclly pursue, but they also maintain a decorum that is tame compared to Western mores(further highlighting the absurdity of all that censoring).Read "Censoring an Iranian Love Story." I doubt tthat any scholarly analysis is as capable of conveying the reality of living in present day Iran. In my opinion, "Censoring an Iranian Love Story" is as important as Orhan Pamuk's, "Snow". That is why I read it, why I could not put down and why you should read it. This is also why Mr. Mandanipour should continue to write and aspire for us in the "uncensored" West. So pleads this reader.

t is well known that Iran is a country in which fundamentalist Islam vies with a more liberal culture for the hearts and minds of its population. Censoring an Iranian Love Story is one of the most unusual books I have read recently and is very difficult to classify. A love story is contained within it, but solely as a vehicle for the author to write an extended set of stories and personal accounts about life in Iran, and particularly the censorship of artistic works. It is full of irony and humour and makes one want to weep for those Iranians who have to live under the current regime while not agreeing with its ethos.Shariar Mandanipour describes how publishers have to invest in a print run before they actually know whether their books will be allowed to be distributed to book-shops. Inspectors check new books for Islamic conformity, and for the purpose of this book, Shariar Mandanipour creates one such, who he names Porfiry Petrovich, the detective in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment charged with solving Raskolnikov's murders.The author then goes on to write a love story, paragraph by paragraph, explaining what the censor will say about each sentence and how the author is going to have change his story to enable it to pass. Of course, in an Islamic nation like Iran, you can't even write about a boy and girl being alone in a room together. An author can't describe their emotions or their appearance other than in the most general terms. Gradually we realise that it is in fact impossible to write a love story at all, for the only acceptable relationships between a boy and a girl are those which have been set up by their parents are are fully chaperoned at every stage.However, Mandanipour writes the story for we Western readers and crosses out the passages which Petrovich is going to delete. In between the short passages of the developing love story he tells other stories about Iran, about censorship, about art and love - the book becoming a dialogue with the reader in a thoroughly engaging way. Throughout this process of writing the story, the author debates with the imaginary Petrovich, and over the course of the novel he emerges as a powerful personality but with a wholly alien (to non-Muslims) approach to life.Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a remarkable book. I came to it thinking that it was going to be a romance, but I found a challenging book which shows the predicament of the artist living in a culture which rejects his art as a great evil. We learn much about the historic culture of Iran and its ancient traditions of art and literature, and can only share Mandanipour's sorrow that only ancient texts and traditional music are freely allowed in the country. How many other writers excellent are yet to be published in translation from nations where censorship prevails? This is only the first book of Mandanipour to be published in English and I can only wait in hope that other's follow.

Shahriar Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2009, Translated by Sara Khalili) is one of the strangest and most interesting books I read. You see, I always had a thing for Persian culture, but being an Egyptian today I know it is almost impossible to be able to witness its greatness through my own two eyes. So when I found Censoring an Iranian Love Story, it was like a treasure to me, hoping it would give me an idea about the modern-day Iran without having to visit! So let me tell you a thing or two about this book.The StoryAs Raha Namy puts it in the Quarterly Conversation, Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a multi-layered story. This - more than slightly - surreal tale tries to give numerous details about the Iranian culture and censorship in a mix of real and fictional story layers that continuously intersect, sometimes confusing between what is real and what is fictional, making it hard for the non-Iranian reader to build a real idea about Iran.Layer 1The innermost layer is the love story between Sara and Dara, whom we don't know if they're completely fictional or based on real characters. Sara is senior student in the University of Tahran studying Iranian Literature, coming from a middle class family that falls behind by the year as a result of the increased inflation that is not met by an increase in her father's pension. She seems normal, but has a revolutionary soul. However, being in a country with very tight limits to freedom of speech, this revolutionary soul is mostly seen in the dark, away from the government's and the "Campaign Against Social Corruption's" eyes. Sara is an avid reader and so has a membership in the local library, this is where Dara first finds her.Dara too used to be a student in Tahran University studying cinema, he was about to graduate before he got detained for being a communist. When he was finally freed after two years, he found out that he was expelled. Dara's family too used to be middle class, but has already fallen far behind as result of the father and son's detentions for being communists. This has led to the father losing his job, as well as his will to live, and the son being unable to find a decent job as a result of losing his almost acquired university degree. Oppression has turned Dara into a passive, defeated person, but one who still loves his country with all his heart.There are also two secondary characters of the story. The first is Mr. Sindbad, Sara's suitor who has a story of his own. Mr. Sindbad came from a very poor family, but was able to fight his way into a government job. He was never into politics and wanted nothing more than the stability that would help him lead the simple life he's living. After the Islamic Revolution, however, he found out that this won't be possible, and that if he wants to continue to live at all, then he'd have to learn to be somewhat a hypocrite. Thus, by hypocrisy and brilliant ideas, he became one of the most powerful and richest businessmen in the country. The other is Dr. Farahad, one of the country's most famous surgeons, who is loved and respected and sees poor clients for free. Dr. Farahad appears a few times in the story in very different and confusing settings.Sara is first introduced to the reader holding an interesting sign in a student protest; it has "DEATH TO DICTATORSHIP, DEATH TO FREEDOM" written on it, she's only a few minutes away from her death. But at last minute, Dara finds her and begs her to abandon the sign and leave with him. This is after one year of exchanging letters through a code they used in library books. When they finally get to the dating stage of their relationship, they have to think of places to meet so that they won't get caught (according to the author women and men who are not direct kin can get arrested if found together). So they meet in a hospital's emergency room, a mosque, an internet cafe and keep their relationship mostly online.Layer 2Comes after this, the layer where the author and the censor work together in writing the story. We're introduced to Mr. Petrovich, who works in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and has the responsibility of revising all books prior to giving a publishing permit. In this layer the author sometimes acts like a god to his characters, telling them what to do and what not to do. Mr. Petrovich, on the other hand acts like a divil, trying to ruin the beauty of the love story thorough wanting to change the storyline or sending other characters in the story. At other times we find the characters working their own destiny and deciding what to do for themselves, despite the author's and censor's intentions.The writer always thinks of what Mr. Petrovich would say and so we'd find him sometimes striking out his own words, because Mr. Petrovich wouldn't give the book a publishing permit otherwise. He also sometimes has to give more details about his love story characters in this layer, because they're details that the censor won't approve. Thus, he gives his readers an idea of how Iranian love stories may lose their depth as a result of censorship.The layer between Mandanipour and Mr. Petrovich is a story in itself, but to make matters more complicated, there is sometimes an intermingling between Layer 1 and Layer 2's characters that sometimes turn so surreal that you wouldn't know what to get out of it.Layer 3In this layer we find popular fictional and non-fictional characters from other literary works and real life coming to the story to give symbolic descriptions. There's the hunchback midget's corpse that keeps appearing in different places to different people. Then ghosts of other writers. Then an Assassin's phantom. Then poets who died some hundred years ago. These characters are mostly symbolic, and this is where surrealism reaches its peek, making it sometimes weak and thus very hard to grasp what the author is trying to tell with his symbols.One interesting, yet one may argue clichéd, use of characters is how the author used Nizami's poem, Khorsow and Shirin. This poem is about a love triangle between a king (Khorsow), a Romanian woman (Shirin) and a poor man (Farahad). Shirin ends up marrying Khorsow and they make sweet love. When Sara and Dara met in the emergency room, they meet a bride named Shirin who was raped by her groom, who is also called Khorsow, and she is saved by Dr. Farahad.Layer 4The outermost layer is where the author finally writes in non-fictional, first-person. He explains different aspects in the Iranian culture and different types of censorship. He tells stories of his own experiences and gives summaries of Iranian classics that are mostly used for symbols. This layer was almost always my favorite. It is here that the author talks of self censorship that was used by poets hundreds of years ago. During that time, they used to use similes from nature in describing a woman's body or a love making scene. He thus explains that censorship sometimes helps get the imagination going.Then he goes on to explain government censorship today, and how they have power (and dirty mind) to sexualize everything. But that's not all, there is all the social censorship, where girls are not allowed to have boyfriends, or to talk to boys they're unrelated to for that matter. With all these levels of censorship, it become impossible to write, or even live, a real love story in Iran.Overall CritiqueThe book as a whole was more than anything confusing, with the never-ending intermingling between fact and fiction, as well as the different story layers. There is depth in the protagonists of the main story, but the elaboration on them is mostly cut through to discuss other things. The love story is extremely weak, but one may argue that this is exactly the writer's point; you cannot write a love story in that sociocultural setting. I, however, have sometimes felt exaggerations in the extent to which Iranian couples can't be together. The fact that this book, being published in 2009, and does not have one mention of cell phones makes me wonder. Same with Iranians being unable to watch movies and listen to music. What happened to VPN? I know from living in a country where censorship does exist (although far from that extreme, in some cases at least) that people always find ways out. What with Iran and Saudi Arabia (and Egypt, too) being among the countries with highest online pornography consumption (according to unofficial lists). Yes, literary works sometimes need to reach extremes to be more interesting, but again, not separating fact from fiction makes this problematic.While I generally don't mind surrealism, in some parts of the book I felt that it's too much, making the reader actually miss the story itself. The symbols all through the story were sometimes clichéd and other times too much to take. As for the writing itself, it was far from creative. In fact, it mostly felt like you had the writer sitting in your living room telling you the story.Without really getting into politics, the author actually got into politics. We see how revolutionaries like Dara were defeated and are now busy just trying to live. We see how even those who were "good" Islamists were abolished from the political scene and had turned into brothel visitors. We see how hypocrisy in modern-day Iran can lead to reaching the top of the ladder. We see how Iran wanted to enrich uranium while its citizens are suffering from increased poverty by the year. Most importantly, we see how women, throughout different eras in Iran were oppressed and sexualized, be it under dictatorships or so-called freedom. We see that revolutionaries did nothing when women were forced to cover up their bodies and spirits, when they have been treated as a shame. We also get into the sociocultural aspects of marriage and relationships in Iran. We see how marriage is the families' decisions more than the bride and groom's. We see how every relationship has to happen in the dark, we see how one of the main deal makers or breakers vis-à-vis marriage in Iran is money and social class. Mind you, these are all the author's opinions, I know nothing about modern-day Iran.Egypt and Iran: enemies that are so much alikeI know nothing of modern-day Iran, but I know a lot about Egypt and the similarities are striking. Although Egypt and Iran's diplomatic ties have become at least not so strong following the Islamic Revolutions, and although some religious fanatics in both countries see us the other as enemies or infidels, for following different Islamic sects (Egypt is mostly Sunni and Iran is mostly S***e), both being middle eastern countries, one can't help see the similarities. Both Egypt and Iran are countries of great civilizations that have been great, and are not anymore. Both countries were once so modern, but have become something else as religious fanatics took over people's minds. When Islamists managed to take power in Egypt for a short period, there was talk of closing shops at 11:00 pm in a country that never sleeps, just like what happens in Iran. People started to talk about a "Campaign Against Social Corruption", just like that of Iran. Women were very much sexualized, just like Iran. Thankfully, the Islamist rule in Egypt lasted only a year, but there are still a lot of sociocultural similarities between Iran and Egypt. Some Egyptian families still wouldn't want their daughters to have boyfriends, marriage is still the decision of families, sociocultural and governmental censorships exist, sexualization and sexual discrimination exist. But most importantly, both Egyptians and Iranians can't help sticking their nose in other people's businesses.There are also similarities between what happened right after the Egyptian and Iranian Revolutions, but I won't get into that too; if you go back and read layer 1 you'll get what I mean. My point is this, being someone who hasn't visited Iran, and would probably not be able to visit any time soon, I can't say that this author's idea of Iran is correct. But the similarities between us and this author's idea of them, makes me feel that he might be correct, and that one may build an opinion based on some of his. It also made me think of how sad it is, how similar we are, yet we're enemies.

Not a very easy read but a novel approach to political issues within the authors home country. As an English reader I read it in a different way than an Iranian would. Worth investing the time to read

The love story in this book never lifts off which makes all the postmodern structuring and censoring concept feel like a gimmick.The political and cultural backdrop of Iran is rich and interesting and stopped me from leaving the book mid way.