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Summary
Summary
LONGLISTED for the 2021 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE
LONGLISTED for the 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Translated Literature
FINALIST for the 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
From the pen of one of Iran's rising literary stars, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is a family story about the unbreakable connection between the living and the dead.
Set in Iran in the decade following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, this moving, richly imagined novel is narrated by the ghost of Bahar, a thirteen-year-old girl, whose family is compelled to flee their home in Tehran for a new life in a small village, hoping in this way to preserve both their intellectual freedom and their lives. But they soon find themselves caught up in the post-revolutionary chaos that sweeps across their ancient land. Bahar's mother, after a tragic loss, will embark on a long, eventful journey in search of meaning in a world swept up in the post-revolutionary madness.
Told from the wise yet innocent gaze of a young girl, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree speaks of the power of imagination when confronted with cruelty, and of our human need to make sense of trauma through the ritual of storytelling itself. Through her unforgettable characters, Azar weaves a timely and timeless story that juxtaposes the beauty of an ancient, vibrant culture with the brutality of an oppressive political regime.
Author Notes
Shokoofeh Azar moved to Australia as a political refugee in 2011. She is the author of essays, articles, and children's books, and is the first Iranian woman to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree , originally written in Farsi, was shortlisted for Australia's Stella Prize for Fiction and is her first novel to be translated into English.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This challenging debut by Iranian writer Azar, forced to flee to Australia in 2011, tells in dreams and fantasies the story of one family during and after the Islamic Revolution, which overtook the country in the last quarter of the 20th century. Thirteen-year-old Bahar narrates from beyond the grave, weaving a phantasmagorical tale that follows her father, Hushang, as he leads his family away from Tehran and their old ways, abandoning rugs and books and intellectual pursuits deemed dangerous by the new Islamic regime, to the small town of Razan, where he hopes to protect them. Propelled by fairy tales of jinn and the dead, the novel meanders from Bahar's own death in a fire set by Islamic thugs to the disappearance, torture, and death of her brother, Sohrab, through the mental struggles of Bahar's mother, who climbs greengage plum trees, and beautiful sister Beeta, who turns into a mermaid. Azar's florid style emulates the rich storytelling tradition of bygone Persia, redolent with Zoroastrian lore and mired in magical vegetation "containing a thousand memories," clearly meant as a bulwark against the oppression of the present day regime. But the promise of the voice is weighed down by clunky writing, rife with repeated and awkward phrasings. Azar's dense family saga is animated by characters who face terror heroically, but it's undercut by the unpolished prose. (Jan.)
Guardian Review
Revolutionary Guards pull a family off the road to check for forbidden items in their silver Buick; they find neither alcohol nor music but Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. After passing the copy around, they conclude that "politically, it was not a dangerous book". The censors have been less forgiving of Shokoofeh Azar's first novel for adults, which was banned in Iran, though many copies have been printed underground. It is now on the shortlist for the 2020 International Booker prize - a first for fiction translated from Farsi. As signalled by the nod to García Márquez, the novel applies magic realism with a Persian twist to Iran after the Islamic revolution of 1979, focusing on one family destroyed by the upheaval. It opens in 1988 as a mother's grief-driven epiphany at the top of a "greengage plum tree" coincides with the execution of her son, hanged without trial and dumped in a mass grave in the deserts south of Tehran - "one of fifteen thousand people ¿ killed for their political beliefs in the 1980s, alone". The youth's 13-year-old sister Bahar had burned to death in a cellar when zealots stormed the family home in Tehran - a mansion filled with Persian poetry, tar music and an "uncensored" library, from Rumi and Shakespeare to Sadegh Hedayat's modern classic The Blind Owl. It is ostensibly the dead girl's ghost who narrates how her bereaved parents, Reza and Hushang, her sister Beeta and brother Sohrab, sought "sanctuary and serenity" in the ancient forests of Mazandaran in northern Iran. As four guards and a mullah pursue them, Sohrab is removed in handcuffs, Reza abandons their forest home, and Beeta, grappling with delusions, morphs into a mermaid in the Caspian sea. Footnotes proliferate: Azar deploys dreams and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Persian folklore, from forest jinns to black snow, to mythologise a revolution's decay and a civilisation devouring itself. The "insatiable" eight-year Iran-Iraq war, stoked "with the flesh of child mine-sweepers", is poignantly evoked through "orphan mothers" who bury their sons with the small golden bells that are tied around children's ankles "so they wouldn't get lost". In a supernatural revenge fantasy, these ranks of cannon fodder join forces with the disappeared to vanquish the "stonily arrogant" Ayatollah Khomeini in his subterranean palace of mirrors, his corpse emitting the "same stench that all dictators secrete in the end". Some playful prose, as when Reza and a blue-eyed Italian backpacker find themselves "high upon the enlightenment of love", suggests a Farsi Isabel Allende. But the main problem is an ill-conceived, and poorly controlled, teenage narrative ("I was nothing but a delusional dead person") more reminiscent of magic realism's New Age spinoff - a cloying genre that went global in the 1990s with novels such as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices. The plot itself suffers from blind alleys (an irrelevant treasure trunk); a premature climax (Khomeini's early nemesis); and a limp ending. The author, who sought political asylum in Australia in 2011, has said she wrote the novel primarily for western readers. But, despite a catalogue of appalling events, we learn surprisingly little of the history behind the revolution. The shah's Literacy Corps is mentioned, but not his secret police. In place of the historical forces at work in García Márquez's fiction, we have national myth. Bahar's immolation is likened to the Arab conquest of Persia, when Islam ousted Zoroastrianism around the seventh century. The family persist in referring to this modern orgy of book burning and killing as "the Arab invasion": "They came and burnt, plundered, and killed. Just like 1,400 years ago." The US-based translator, whose name the UK publishers have withheld "for reasons of safety and at the translator's request", has made a good job of sections. But, too often, it reads like a draft, tripping up the reader. Consider this description of a treehouse: "It had a window facing the sunrise and a door facing its setting" - the sun's setting, that is. Or this: "Life is precisely that which she and others were prodigiously killing - the moment itself." In the most convincing section, set decades after the revolution, the bereaved father passes morality police and chador-clad women in Tehran, feeling "alien in his own country". Detained, he writes a record of his life, investing desperate hope in the power of the imagination to transport him from the "stale minds" of his captors. Few would quarrel with such a sentiment. Yet to overlook the book's flaws risks what South African writers under apartheid, eager for a robust critical response to their art, memorably scorned as "solidarity criticism". It would also be regrettable if the claims made for this ambitious but uneven novel deterred even a few readers from venturing further into Farsi literature.
Booklist Review
Although the page facing the title of Azar's first novel to be translated into English clearly states, Translated from the Farsi, the linguistic enabler remains anonymous; the publisher's official line is, the translator of this book has asked not to be named out of fears for his/her safety. Author Azar is no stranger to danger, having escaped to Australia as a political refugee in 2011. Her fiction rings too true, bearing witness to the heinous atrocities suffered by bewildered everyday citizens in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the monarchy and installed Ayatollah Khomeini's brutal regime. The titular, albeit mournfully ironic, enlightenment happens to Mom at 2:35 p.m. on August 18, 1988, atop the greengage plum tree at the exact moment when her son, Sohrab, is hanged without trial and his body is about to be dumped into a mass grave with hundreds of victims of the same injustice. Sohrab is her second murdered child, the first having been Bahar, burned alive at 13, whose death doesn't prevent her from existing among and communicating with the living. The future of the family's surviving child, Beeta, remains threatened. Despite the relentless tragedy, Azar's narrative exudes fairy tale charm driven by moments of deep connection that ultimately celebrate human and humane bonds unbroken even in death.--Terry Hong Copyright 2019 Booklist
