Only death does not lie.
A man looks from a hole in his cellar into a courtyard and sees a woman that beguiles him. He knows she is too beautiful for him, but indeed, one day she knocks on the door of his house and gives herself to him. Only afterward does he feel how cold she is, and realizes that the whole time she's been dead. He cuts her body into pieces and takes surreptitiously to be buried in a suitcase. The experience sends him into such a fugue of obsession and melancholy that he begins to write his life story, narrating it to the shadow of his own figure on the wall, a shadow shaped menacingly like an owl: as a young man, he was married to a woman who despised him, and the agony of her coldness toward him became mixed with a long sickness, both physical and spiritual, that separated him from other people, perhaps even--in his eyes--making him better than those with health. Of course, if we take the man's story as at least resembling the truth, we have already noticed that there is no wife in the picture when the dead woman arrives at his doorway, and so we may piece together where the story he is telling may end.
Iranian writer Sedagh Hedayat's The Blind Owl lives somewhere in between Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe. But better than either of these it captures something of the horror and dread that live inside the human psyche; it's most reminiscent of "The Tell-Tale Heart," but in that story there is a kind of outer truth by which to measure the madness of the man who hearts the heartbeat beneath the floorboards. In The Blind Owl, there's no real outer truth, and the imagistic circularity of the novel is proof that we are not in a place where the logic of realism really holds. The novel makes frequent use of repetition, bringing back the same phrase or sentence without context as if it's being said for the first time. In the first section, the unnamed narrator is taken to the cemetery by a carriage driver who seems unable to draw any inferences about what's being carted to the cemetery in a suitcase; after the narrator wanders for a while, the same man picks him up again--and tells him all about the real weirdo he just dropped off the cemetery. I loved, too, the way the younger narrator becomes obsessed with his wife's infidelity, focusing on the ragged old peddler he thinks she's letting into her room each night, only to look in the mirror after he--spoiler alert--murders her, and find the peddler's face.
Is the dead woman who gives herself to him the same as the wife he murders? Are we to understand that his wife, or a version of his wife, gives up to him in death what she always refused him in life? The narrator writes that he himself, in his illness, becomes enlarged by his proximity to death; perhaps, the novel suggests, death is not just something that haunts us, but has the ability to perfect us or make us ideal. Or maybe it's only the ravings of a madman, and the story of the dead woman is a way of rationalizing the narrator's guilt of having killed his wife, by revising the truth into a story where she is grateful both to be dead and to give herself to him. Who knows. I did find that The Blind Owl hits a note of surrealism and macabre that I actually don't find all that convincing in Poe. These short books for short book February go by so quickly, and I've been sick, so The Blind Owl felt a little like a fever dream to me--but I think there's something really rich here worth returning to, and that coming back to this book again in the future might yield something totally new and different.
With the addition of Iran, my "Countries Read" list is up to 103!
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