The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels (Paperback)

Freya Stark traveled among the remote valleys of western Persia (today's Iran) in the early 1930s, when this area was barely known and rarely visited by Europeans. (Actually, it's not much better known today.) But while her travels may have been pioneering, this account is surprisingly dull and mundane. Stark travels from village to village, briefly meeting the locals, eats a meal or two, then goes on the next day to repeat the process. There's rarely a spark of excitement or adventure -- just a dry recording of events and observations.

Stark's aloof writing style doesn't help. She seems to keep the reader at arm's length from the characters she meets, offering just a superficial look at most of them.

The first half of the book is further handicapped by a lack of maps. As Stark travels about, she casually rattles off the names of landmarks and places as if the reader were intimately acquainted with the area. In fact, frustrated readers will soon discover that it is impossible to tell whether she is traveling east, west, north or south -- or just wandering in circles. The second half of the book has three maps, which helps, although you'll need a magnifying glass to read one of them.

I don't want to make it sound like there is NOTHING interesting in this book. There are a few moments of tense encounters, and occassionally she shows off a dry wit. But these are too few and far between. I can only recommend this book to someone who has a scholarly interest in this region of Iran.

The prose is basically along these lines: "And so we came to a village and there were tribesmen there and we all gathered into a tent & drank tea." I mean, it's THAT dry; there is no emotion or suspense to this book whatsoever.

If this book had good historical data it would be acceptable (and I'll admit that that was what I was expecting), but unfortunately it is a travelogue, not a history lesson, and ends up reading like the personal journal of a very boring person (though I know that Ms. Stark has led anything BUT a boring life).

However, it IS a travelogue after all, not a history book, so it's not like I was deceived -- I just thought it would've been something else. Therefore, no less than 3 stars.

On the other hand, I found this to be a wonderful narrative of a trip to a land that most people will never see, a visit to cultures that are most likely gone in today's world, and, most interestingly, the story of a woman in an area in which women never venture far from their homes. Her descriptions of the details of the countryside and the lives of the people she meets are exquisite and conjure up images despite the absence of pictures. Because of the quality of the writing, it is an easy and fairly quick read.