A skilled storyteller with a bent for the quietly macabre and the burdens of those crushed by totalitarian rule.
Iranian writer Mandanipour delivers a series of stories that are alternately spectral and somber but altogether subversive.
In the opening story, "Shadows of the Cave," a widower quietly defies the new Iranian theocracy by wearing a dark suit and tie, “which since the revolution has been considered ‘the leash of civilization’ and is unofficially banned,” in order to visit his wife’s grave in a cemetery now crowded with victims of the mullahs. He defies the censorial dictates of the regime as well, keeping a large private library, nursing memories of a long-ago post before the shah’s coup d’état of 1953. The library—and this is the crux—focuses on animals, with which Mr. Farvaneh has a philosophical obsession: “At times,” he intones, “their indifference to humans is truly insulting.” In the title story, Iran’s war with Iraq provides a scenario in which endless suffering breeds just that indifference to other humans, as a wounded Iraqi in no-man’s land eventually disintegrates against an exposed hillside. Remarks the Iranian narrator, “One day, we noticed that his lips had decomposed—it was the worms’ doing—his long teeth were exposed; he looked like he was laughing. Late one night, an animal ripped off his arm and took it away, but he didn’t fall.” Nasser, the doomed Iraqi soldier, is a drag on morale on both sides, but there’s nothing anyone can do until finally an officer, driven nearly mad by combat, erases his presence with a rocket. In "Seven Captains," speaking to current headlines, another soldier gloomily remarks of the power plant he’s guarding, “There’s talk that the Westerners have said they’ll bomb it. If they do, people say we’ll all die….Do you think they’re right?” Death comes in many forms in stories marked by symbolic animals: fish, worms, cuckoos, cowering dogs, snakes that hide among “the arabesque motif on the carpet,” everywhere they can trouble the dreams of struggling humans.
A skilled storyteller with a bent for the quietly macabre and the burdens of those crushed by totalitarian rule.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-942658-95-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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