AT THE WALL OF THE ALMIGHTY

This remarkably intricate and fascinating first novel dramatizes in luxuriant and resonant detail the ordeal of a political prisoner of the Iranian revolution of the late 1970s. He is Moshiris unnamed narrator: an accused ``Unbreakable'' who won't confess his (supposed) crimes or repent of his alleged apostasy from the ``faith'' brandished by zealots currently in power. Bullied and seduced by the mercurial prison guard ``Loony Kamal,'' and having realized that the ``only way to survive is to return,'' the narrator recalls and reinvents the history of his highborn liberal family and that of their village, surrounded (in fact, imprisoned) by an increasingly high wall that is being patiently built by the Sisyphean shape-changing figure of Ali the Bricklayera vivid embodiment of the spirit of a populace caught between its impulse toward independence and its obedience to archaic mores and laws. The artful confusions of time, place, and characters brilliantly reinforce Moshiri's commanding theme: that anyone, regardless of his actions, may be perceived as both a hero of, and a traitor to, Iran's ``Holy'' Revolution. A superb debut.