Book Review

Balali, Mehrdad. Houri. Sag Harbor, NY: Permanent Press, 2009.

Shahed, the main character in this book, grew up in Tehran but now lives in California where he is unhappily employed as a gas station attendant. After the death of an on and off girlfriend in California, he returns to Tehran to confront the ghosts of his past, most particularly those concerning his father who died three years earlier.

Shahed's father was a gadfly who squandered any money that the family acquired on “friends” who conveniently appeared to enjoy his largesse and on his many girlfriends, leaving his family impoverished and leaving his wife to have to provide for the family with what little she could successfully keep from him. Houri is the object of Shahed's childish affections, a friend of his mothers who eventually becomes yet another one of his father's conquests. Eventually Shahed is able to realize his dream of leaving his father behind and moving to the United States. This is in the late 1960's when Iran is still a secular nation.

When Shahed returns to Tehran in the early 1980's, he returns to a much different city, one ruled by Islamic fundamentalists. The contrast from the Tehran of his youth to the Tehran under fundamentalist rule actually causes him to be sentimental for the father who tortured him so in his youth.

I found this book to be very well written. The account of being an immigrant to the United States of Iranian descent in the late sixties and early eighties is much grittier and more realistic than other similar books, from the unsatisfying choice of employment to the overt racism which Shahed encounters. In contrast, Shahed's former life in Iran is by no means idealized. From the poverty of his background, to the the account of his father's selfishness, to his encounters with cruel headmasters and his Opium addicted uncle E, this is a much earthier depiction of pre-revolution Iran than one usually encounters. Highly recommended.