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Summary
Summary
Gossip was rife in the capital about the poetess of Qazvin. Some claimed she had been arrested for masterminding the murder of the grand Mullah, her uncle. Others echoed her words, and passed her poems from hand to hand. Everyone spoke of her beauty, and her dazzling intelligence. But most alarming to the Shah and the court was how the poetess could read. As her warnings and predictions became prophecies fulfilled, about the assassination of the Shah, the hanging of the Mayor, and the murder of the Grand Vazir, many wondered whether she was not only reading history but writing it as well. Was she herself guilty of the crimes she was foretelling?
Set in the world of the Qajar monarchs, mayors, ministers, and mullahs, this book explores the dangerous and at the same time luminous legacy left by a remarkable person. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani offers a gripping tale that is at once a compelling history of a pioneering woman, a story of nineteenth century Iran told from the street level up, and a work that is universally relevant to our times.
Author Notes
Bahiyyih Nakhjavani grew up in Uganda, was educated in the United Kingdom and the United States, and now lives in France. She is the author of The Saddlebag and Paper as well as non-fiction works about fundamentalism and education. Her novels have been published in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Russian, and Korean. She was praised in the Times Literary Supplement as a "superb Persian novelist," and the French translation of The Woman Who Read Too Much was identified, in 2007, as "one of the best three books" of the year.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
This 18th-century Persian mystic is one of the most powerfully convincing characters in recent historical fiction Set down in human language, divine revelation has spawned thousands of exegeses, glosses and interpretations, each demanding to be read as the only true one. Centuries of reformations and counter-reformations, heresies and schisms, crusades and intifadas, and overall bloodshed have been the consequence of differing interpretations of a certain grammatical construction or an obscure metaphor. Islam tells us that just over 14 centuries ago, God decided to dictate his word to a shepherd chosen as the Last Prophet. From that date on, the faithful have debated its meaning, choosing sides that in turn split to declare that theirs, and no other, is the true reading. Religious faith entails an unreasonable faith in the exactitude of language. Early in the 19th century, in Persia, a holy man known as the Baha'u'llah became convinced that the true reading of God's word revealed that humanity shared a common spiritual source, and he declared that all races and cultures were equally worthy of consideration. Accused of promoting dangerous heretical ideas, the Baha'u'llah was exiled from Persia and died in an Ottoman prison, but the tenets of his faith survive today among more than five million Baha'i followers. As if to prove that no theological pronouncement is ever definitive, around 1840 a young Persian poet, Fatimah Baraghani, known as Tahirih ("The Pure One") and Qurratu l-'Ayn ("Consolation of the Eyes"), proposed a further radical reading of God's word that combined messianic notions with the teachings of Baha'u'llah. Considered a heretic by the Persian clergy, Tahirih was placed under house arrest and was executed in August 1852. She was 38. Tahirih's religious inspiration, poetic genius, philosophical acumen and physical beauty might seem an appropriate subject for hagiography: either a manaqib (the account of a holy person's merits and miracles) or a fadail (a discussion of her virtuous qualities). Less interested in theology than in literature, Bahiyyih Nakhjavani has chosen to construct, around the figure of Tahirih, a complex fragmented portrait that brings to literary life not only the remarkable personality of someone little known in the west, but also the convoluted Persia of the 19th century, treacherous and bloodthirsty. Under the rule of a weak and capricious shah, traitors and greedy politicians, grand viziers and ambitious mayors, intransigent mullahs and common folk rise and fall at a vertiginous rate. It is, of course, a male society in which women have found ways to manipulate policies and influence the course of events, but from the shadows of the anderoun, the women's section of the palace. In this, Tahirih stands almost alone as "the Woman Who Read Too Much", her acquired art granting her access to knowledge and her knowledge the courage to speak. Tahirih marvellously exemplifies the power of the reader, and the fear this power elicits in those placed in positions of authority. Nakhjavani has woven her portrait around what amounts almost to an absence. For the first three sections of the novel, Tahirih is a haunting voice conjured up in the narrative through the prejudices and passions of the women who have reluctantly known her. Though these witnesses are all female, they are defined through their relationship to a man: "The Book of the Mother", "The Book of the Daughter", "The Book of the Wife" (the mother and the sister of the shah, and the wife of the disgraced mayor). The potency of their voices in Nakhjavani's narrative contrasts strongly with these nomenclatures of dependency. As the wife of the British envoy realises, "Contrary to all appearances, this was a country effectively ruled by women." Through the stories of these three women, the reader has intermittent glimpses of Tahirih's uneasy presence, powerful and determined, inspired and confident. The fourth and concluding section gives voice to Tahirih herself, and even here, in "The Book of the Daughter", she is defined through her relationship to her father, a mullah who had educated her "as a boy". For this, he is deemed guilty. Each account explores different aspects of the story, crossing back and forth in time and exploring consequences and causes, plots and counterplots, court machinations and attempts at rebellion and subversion. In a beautifully unobtrusive and graceful style, Nakhjavani succeeds in portraying these currents and countercurrents, and the many conflicting characters, in a narrative that is breathtaking in its scope and wonderfully illuminating. Above all, the figure of Tahirih, -- a fighter, a philosopher, a poet -- becomes one of the most powerfully convincing characters in recent historical fiction. * Alberto Manguel's latest book is Curiosity (Yale). - Alberto Manguel.
Kirkus Review
A mid-19th-century Persian poetess clashes against old-world gender expectations, religious orthodoxy, and politics in this exquisite tale, based on the actual life of poet and theologian Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn. Four haunting, first-person narratorsthe Mother of the Shah, the Wife of the Mayor, the sister of the Shah, and the daughter of the poetess of Qazvinrecall how the poetess emancipated Tehran's citizens with literacy, predicted the fates of a Mullah and a high-ranking government official, and scandalously displayed her naked face to some four score of men. The poetess of Qazvin "knew too much, thought too much, read far too much, and finally said too much, tooshe had always been a rebel....A heretic from the start." Under orders of the Shah, the Mayor holds her captive for three years, and though the Shah promises her release, the poetess is put to death. Nakhjavani (Paper, 2005, etc.) leaps nimbly back and forth through time, connecting events from the first attempt on the Shah's life to public executions, the city's widespread famine and bread riots, betrayal, and exile. And when the Shah is assassinated, palace rumors trace his demise to the poetess's influence on the kingdom. The author's language mesmerizes. About the cunning Mayor's wife, she writes: "Her words drifted over the walls and down the alleys, like the sizzling of kebabs and the smell of fried onion. Her opinions even penetrated through the palace gates at times, and lingered in the royal anderoun with the persistence of fenugreek." Nakhjavani deftly transforms an incomplete history into legend. An ambitious effort produces an expertly crafted epic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Set in nineteenth-century Iran and based on the life of poet and scholar Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn, Nakhjavani's (The Saddlebag, 2000) historical novel is told via the perspectives of both the mother and sister of the reigning shah; the wife of the city's mayor; and the daughter of the woman at the heart of a restrictive society's upheaval, the controversial poetess of Qazvin. Perceived to be a harlot or a saint, an infidel or an angel, the poetess is fiercely committed to conveying the importance of literacy for all citizens, but most certainly for women, activism that unleashes a storm of conflicting ideas about how she should be treated. Elevated to palace advisor? Stoned for apostasy? Imprisoned for betrayal? Although set in the Victorian era, Nakhjavani's portrait is as contemporary as today's headlines, filled with issues ranging from women's subjugation and gender inequality to political violence and religious fundamentalism. Internationally acclaimed for her fiction and her nonfiction about religion and education, Nakhjavani offers a philosophically complex yet lyrically wrought examination of the eternal struggle for women's rights.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2015 Booklist
