Censoring an Iranian Love Story (Hardcover)

"In what now reads like an eerie echo of the killing of a young Iranian woman cut down by a bullet during this month's election protests, the Iranian author of this new novel [in its opening pages] foresees the possible death of his heroine in the streets of Tehran. At once a novel about two young Iranians trying to conduct a covert romance in Tehran; a postmodern account of the efforts of their creator to grapple with the harsh censorship rules of his homeland; and an Escher-like meditation on the interplay of life and art, reality and fiction, [Censoring an Iranian Love Story] leaves the reader with a harrowing sense of what it is like to live in Tehran under the mullahs' rule, and the myriad ways in which the Islamic government's strict edicts on everything from clothing to relationships between the sexes permeate daily life. The novel provides a darkly comic view of the Kafkaesque absurdities of living in a country where movies could be subject to review by a blind censor; where records of enrollment at a university can be so thoroughly erased by authorities that a student can come to doubt even his own name. At its best, Censoring an Iranian Love Story becomes a Kundera-like rumination on philosophy and politics [that] playfully investigates the possibilities and limits of storytelling. . . . A clever Rubik's Cube of a story, [and] a haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran, even before the brutalities of the current crackdown."
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Censorship is an endlessly fascinating subject; a puzzle box, a Russian nesting doll in which the writer's truth is buried and often lost. . . . In Censoring an Iranian Love Story, a writer (also named Shahriar Mandanipour and the author's alter ego) tries to write the story of Sara and Dara, a young couple in love, and finds himself in a metaphorical burka. He is forced to change his story, characters and dialogue to comply with the restrictions of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the person of a Dostoevskian character, Mr. Petrovich. . . . The only thing a writer can do is treat the censorship like a new form [of art], a villanelle or a sonnet . . . Censorship is just another way of messing with reality. It's hard enough to generate one's own ideas without having someone else's superimposed over them, but the fictional Mandanipour finds soaring metaphors to replace simple, yet offensive actions. Things are crossed out, political and sexual, that will prevent his book from being published. He writes a love story that is convincingly, achingly impossible in a place where men and women cannot even look at each other in public. The effect (as every good Victorian understood) is deliriously sensual prose. . . . A 'perfect and beautiful story,' Shahriar warned his censor, 'is the most dangerous story.' Mandanipour has triumphed."
–Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

"Exciting . . . Powerful . . . Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. . . . Among other things, Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a tough reply to such maundering. . . . This novel, [Mandanipour's] first major work to be translated into English, was written in Farsi but cannot be read in Iran. His book is thus acutely displaced: it had to have been written with an audience outside of Iran in mind, but in a language that this audience would mostly not understand; it depends on translation for its being, yet its being is thoroughly Iranian, lovingly and allusively so, dense with local reference. And it takes as its subject exactly these paradoxes, for it is explicitly about what can and cannot be written in contemporary Iranian fiction. . . . Two Tehran natives, Dara and Sara, meet at a student demonstration outside Tehran University, and spend the next two hundred and eighty pages attempting not so much to consummate their relationship as simply to begin it. It is like something out of Laurence Sterne, and Mandanipour . . . is playfully alive to the elasticated comedy of a story that expends all its energy on failing to start. But this narrative foreplay isn't just play, because it is forced and not free, conditioned by Iranian political reality. . . . Mandanipour's inventive way of depicting censorship in his novel is to inscribe it, quite literally, in the pages of his novel. So throughout the book, whenever the story of Dara and Sara becomes unacceptably political or erotic, offending sentences are crossed out . . . The text is veiled, but the author lifts the veil for his non-Iranian audience. . . . It is an effective, simple idea . . . Censoring an Iranian Love Story is not simply prohibited by censorship but made by it. For Mandanipour, the censor is a kind of co-writer of the book . . . Even more interesting, the writer, in this situation, becomes his characters; he wants what they want. Their freedom is bound up with his. This interdependency does provocative things to the relation of fiction to reality. On the one hand, fiction becomes more real–real enough to strike lines through. On the other hand, fiction becomes more fictional–multiple writers (the author and his censors) are making up a collective story as they go along, improvising, cutting, editing, bargaining with each other. One of the great successes of this book is how thoroughly it persuades the reader that a novel about censorship could not help also being a novel about fiction-making; and it thus brings a political gravity to a fictive self-consciousness sometimes abused by the more weightless postmodernism. [The author's] commentary, in which Mandanipour writes as himself, entertainingly informs the reader about the riskier aspects of the two protagonists, the history of censorship in Iran, the revolution of 1979, and so on. . . . Mandanipour's writing is exuberant, bonhomous, clever, profuse with puns and literary-political references; the reader unversed in contemporary Iranian fiction might easily think of Kundera (who is alluded to), or of the Rushdie of Midnight's Children. . . . Charming and often witty."
–James Wood, The New Yorker

"In this brilliantly conceived and cleverly written novel, characters and author together and separately act and write with sly purpose, disguising and disavowing their subversive ends–to live, love, and create in today's repressive Iranian society."
–Barbara Fisher, Boston Sunday Globe

"In his first novel to be translated into English, Shahriar Mandanipour sets out to write the story of young lovers struggling to consummate their prenuptial passion under the eyes of the Iranian morals police. They hang out in Internet cafes, dark movie houses and on the jammed and smoggy streets of modern-day Tehran. The clandestine courtship comes at a time when university students protest, and vigilantes watch out for transgressing neighbors. A war with U.S. troops and suicide bombers rages in next-door Iraq. Telling amorous tales in post-Islamic-revolution Iran is tricky, if not downright dangerous, but a fictional writer named Shahriar Mandanipour is up to the task. . . . As he tells his censor-wary story, the matchmaking narrator employs symbol, metaphor and plenty of heartache–nods to Barthes and Borges that of course don't go unnoticed by the narrator. American pop culture references (Danielle Steele, Steve McQueen, John Wayne, Linkin Park, Titanic, and Vertigo), combined with a reverie-like prose, summon Murakami. Hypothetical narratives and digressions lend humor and irony. Like some stylishly innovative movies (Brazil and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind leap to mind), the form is essential to the work's overall meaning. Unable to publish his fiction from 1992 until 1997 because of censorship, Mandanipour the real-life novelist lets loose. . . . And as much as humor dominates the book, it quietly gets at something else–the omnipotence of tyranny. In the novel, censors scrub literature, magazines, movies of anything that may invoke love or lust. The idea of an Iranian love story is a sad oxymoron. . . . Reconciling differences in morality and religion is complicated, but Mandanipour takes a stab at it. While we may know the author's allegiances, he also seems to be arguing that we should at least write about those differences, as difficult as they are."
–Trenton Daniel, The Miami Herald

"It's not your typical love story: Boy sees Girl's shoes under a card catalog at the library. Boy falls in love with Girl and writes her coded letters in books. Writer goes nuts trying to pen a love scene in a country where Boy and Girl can't legally be together, either in public or private. Then the corpse of a hunchback dwarf shows up.  If you're looking for a tale of love triumphing over all obstacles or a Middle Eastern Romeo and Juliet, seek elsewhere. [But] if you like the intellectual challenge of the metafiction of J.M. Coetzee or Paul Auster, or the sheer spiraling loopiness of Charlie Kaufman films such as Adaptation, then grab a copy [of Censoring an Iranian Love Story] and prepare to enjoy a meditation on culture, modern Iran, and the power of what is left out. Oh, and make sure you read all the crossed-out lines: There's some pretty pivotal information hiding under there. As with Adaptation, Mandanipour's main character is named Shahriar Mandanipour, a novelist who's having a horrible time writing a 'simple love story.' His problem is the difficulty of trying to find ways to outsmart the government censor. Also, his characters won't do what he tells them. As Mandanipour rewrites different scenes, frantically crosses out lines, and explains cultural references from 700-year-old ghazals to the Al Pacino film Scent of a Woman (good luck getting that title past the censors), he is instructing a Western reader in the art of the unwritten. The ellipsis, we are given to understand, is one of the mos...

From one of Iran’s most acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers, his first novel to appear in English—a dazzlingly inventive work of fiction that opens a revelatory window onto what it’s like to live, to love, and to be an artist in today’s Iran.

The novel entwines two equally powerful narratives. A writer named Shahriar—the author’s fictional alter ego—has struggled for years against the all-powerful censor at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Now, on the threshold of fifty, tired of writing dark and bitter stories, he has come to realize that the “world around us has enough death and destruction and sorrow.” He sets out instead to write a bewitching love story, one set in present-day Iran. It may be his greatest challenge yet.

Beautiful black-haired Sara and fiercely proud Dara fall in love in the dusty stacks of the library, where they pass secret messages to each other encoded in the pages of their favorite books. But Iran’s Campaign Against Social Corruption forbids their being alone together. Defying the state and their disapproving parents, they meet in secret amid the bustling streets, Internet cafés, and lush private gardens of Tehran.

Yet writing freely of Sara and Dara’s encounters, their desires, would put Shahriar in as much peril as his lovers. Thus we read not just the scenes Shahriar has written but also the sentences and words he’s crossed out or merely imagined, knowing they can never be published.

Laced with surprising humor and irony, at once provocative and deeply moving, Censoring an Iranian Love Story takes us unforgettably to the heart of one of the world’s most alluring yet least understood cultures. It is an ingenious, wholly original novel—a literary tour de force that is a triumph of art and spirit.