The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

I retired as deep as I could into the depths of my own being like an animal that hides itself in a cave in the wintertime. I heard other people's voices with my ears; my own I heard in my throat. The solitude that surrounded me was like the deep, dense night of eternity, that night of dense, clinging, contagious darkness which awaits the moment when it will descend upon silent cities full of dreams of lust and rancour. From the viewpoint of this throat with which I had identified myself I was nothing more than an insane abstract mathematical demonstration. The pressure which, in the act of procreation, holds together two people who are striving to escape from their solitude is the result of this same streak of madness which exists in every person, mingled with regret at the thought that he is slowly sliding towards the abyss of death...

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!

The Twilight War by David Crist

"[This] is a story in which I have been a participant, dispassionate scholar, and, most recently, an advistor to senior Defense Department officials." - David Crist

I remember a professor of mine in grad school telling me, "People love secret histories and untold stories. It's annoying. People aren't interested in books that expand on existing knowledge." For some reason, that stuck with me, and I've come back to it over the years. I think it is mostly correct. Intrigue sells. However, just because a work of history focuses on some heretofore unknown or little-known facet of history doesn't render it unworthy of attention. David Crist's The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran is an excellently researched work of history. That was Crist is writing about is little-known makes the book that much more interesting.

Crist spent eight months in Iraq during the First Gulf War. He was part of a marine armor reconnaissance battalion. After the war, he went back to graduate school for a doctorate in Middle Eastern history. In 2003, he found himself back in Iraq as on of the few marines assigned to the navy's elite SEALS. As you might imagine, this brings a unique perspective to his writing.

Crist takes us on a methodical, detailed account of the conflict between Iran and the United States, beginning with the fall of the Shah of Iran and ending with the 2011 sanctions against Iran. His extensive military knowledge and connections enable him to describe military equipment and maneuvers in a detailed and informative manner. Crist rarely introduces a new person in the story without given at least a quick physical description of them. He style slips back and forth between detailed and casual, in a nearly seamless manner.

Despite Crist's fluid writing, the book is not a quick or necessarily easy read. The subject matter is dense and complex. The story cuts across five decades and six U.S. presidencies. However, if you are interested in U.S. military history, international relations or the Middle East, you will find this book engrossing.

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

Though Jim's review was not uniformly positive, I thought that his description of Andre Dubus III's House of Sand and Fog made it sound sufficiently interesting to give it a go-round. Unfortunately, I think that he enjoyed it quite a bit more than I did.

The story is about a house--a particularly ordinary house near the California coast--that is taken away from one woman, Kathy Nicolo, by clerical error, and sold to Colonel Behrani, a former Iranian military officer scraping by in the United States after being forced away by the Iranian revolution. The third player is Lester Burdon, a sheriff who falls in love with Kathy despite being the one to evict her from the house.

For Kathy, the house is a symbol of history and stability, for Behrani, it is his way into real estate and the promise of a better future for his wife and children. Though Jim notes that Behrani seemed more unreasonable than Kathy, I'm not sure I felt the same--the house clearly has great symbolic value for Behrani, who struggles with the loss of his identity in his new home, and I can understand that he might not want to give it up easily. However, I never received a fair answer to this question--since the kind of auction where Behrani purchases Kathy's house seems rather common, why can't he just do it again with a house that isn't ill-gotten?

What I expected was the kind of story I love, two opposing sides who believe themselves to be in the right hurtling toward tragedy. And that is the sort of story I think that Dubus intended, and yet I found crucial elements missing--though I am not quite sure what to call them. Is it likability? I admit that I felt some measure of affection for Behrani, who carries himself like a wounded lion, hurting very deeply but refusing to admit it even to himself. And yet, as Jim notes, he is stubborn, and sometimes inexplicably so. Kathy I found easy to loathe, a flighty and witless woman who throws away weeks worth of notices from the tax office because she claims that she was in a state of confusion or mental unrest after her husband leaves her. When she isn't busy being helpless she spends her time being hapless, giving in without resistance to a love affair with Lester, as well as the bottle. With the house gone her life is unraveling, and while that explains some of the things she does--like pointing Lester's revolver at a convenience store clerk during a nervous breakdown, or the various ways she intrudes upon the Behranis--don't exactly make Behrani's assessment of her as a psycho bitch any less accurate.

But the worst of the three is the sheriff, Lester. Jim finds him to be the most tragic figure, and to be sure he causes the most tragedy, but I found myself rooting for Lester to get his most of the time. Here is a man, married with kids, who is so overcome by Kathy's beauty that he enters into an extended affair with her, and idolizes her so much that he bends--and breaks--the law in severe and mystifying way to help her get her house back. Perhaps it is because Kathy seems like such a poor catch that I find it difficult to hold Lester in such high esteem--why ruin your life and the life of others for such a nutjob? There simply is no magic in their affair, which is cheap and ugly, and that makes the things Lester does for Kathy--ridiculous, improbable things which pull the pin on the tragedy--seem all the more absurd.

But more than that, I think these characters suffer from a lack of believability. I have been trying to put my finger on it for a while now, and I think that perhaps the issue is that these characters fit their types too snugly. Behrani is a proud man dealing with the loss of his status and the difficult future of his family, but there is no spark in him that signifies to us that he is a human being. Kathy is worse. She is a recovering addict and an addict who is recovering; her relationships with people operate around that single facet. Though I have not seen the film, I think perhaps it may succeed where the novel does not on the strength of performances by good actors like Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley, who have the power to breathe life into writing that is rather inanimate.

To boot, the first three-quarters of the book are pretty damn boring. Kathy sits outside her house and broods, then fucks Lester; Behrani rages inwardly about Kathy, or his ouster from Iran, or his wife's dissatisfaction. The final chapters are better, because they ratchet up the action level about 90%, and the tragedy unfolds, but never does the plot seem borne from the character of real people but engineered meticulously by the (not so) invisible hand of the author. But what is left, at the end? There's quite a lot of blood and ruin, but why? To teach these fatuous people a lesson? This is a tricky game if not done right; here it feels as if Dubus is punishing his characters simply for punishment. The tragedy was conceived long before what precedes it; tragedy is the point. Like tearing the wings off of flies.

I guess to someone who likes this book all of my complaints ought to seem unfair; after all I'm on record above as loving a good tragedy. But this one is too thin, too bloodless to work for me.

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

He would drive to San Bruno and look for Kathy there. it was practically their entire geographical frame of reference. If she wasn't at the storage shed or the truck-stop bar or the El Rancho Motel, then he would try Carl's Jr. on the other side of the freeway. And if that didn't pan out he'd drive south to Millbrae to the Cineplex, where she could possibly be at the movies. Ahead of him in the fog, Corona's main street ended at the base of the hills and the intersection for the turn to Hillside Boulevard and San Bruno. The blinking yellow traffic light above was so obscured it looked to Lester more like a silent pulse. Kathy would not be at her stolen house up in the hills but the colonel would, and there was no crime in cruising slowly by; he was off-duty and out of uniform.

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III is the story of Kathy Nicolo, Sheriff Lester Burdon, Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani and their tragic crossing of paths. Kathy wakes one morning to find Sheriff Burdon at her door, informing her that she has been evicted by the county for failing to pay back taxes. Ms. Nicolo informs the Sheriff that there must have been a clerical error, that she owes no taxes. Her pleas prove ineffectual, and her home is auctioned off to Colonel Behrani, a Persian immigrant set on reselling the house for a profit to provide for his family. Behrani is determined to see his family returned to the dignified position they once held in Iran. Kathy's home was all she had left after her husband suddenly left her and she is not willing to let it go easily. Lester find himself falling in love with Kathy and refuses to sit idly by while she suffers a grave injustice. The collosion of these three forces of will leaves families destroyed, lives ruined, and blood spilt.

Dubus' writing is smooth and has its own flow to it. His style is really a pleasure to read. But I have a hard time saying I enjoyed this book. There's really not much to come away from feeling good about. Simply put, House of Sand and Fog is a tragedy. More Shakespearean than Greek, I think. While Kathy and Behrani have their flaws, Lester reminded me of Paris in Romeo and Juliet in the sense that he was merely a victim of circumstance. More or less a simple man, Lester is driven to the edge by his love for a woman he barely knows. Like Paris, he strikes me as the most tragic character in the story, for his life (and that of his family) are ruined because of his involvement in the clash between Behrani and Nicolo.

I suppose if I had one problem with this story, it was the unbalanced portrayal of the plights of Kathy and Behrani. I don't know if Dubus intended to make Behrani seem more at fault than Kathy, but I think it's more likely that he simply failed at making Behrani's motives as justifiable as Kathy's. A young woman has her house stolen out from her because of an improperly addressed envelope. She finds herself homeless with nothing in the bank. She calmly explains this to the man who has bought her home from the county, and yet he refuses to help her rectify the situation by complying with the county when they try to rescind the sale. Now, I understand that Behrani is simply trying to enter the real estate market and provide for his wife and son. I understand that Behrani feels he has committed no wrongdoing in legally purchasing the house from the county. I understand that he has suffered greatly since the fall of the Shah's regime and his flight from Iran. But even with all that, I can't help but look at him as a stubborn, greedy man who knowingly held on to stolen property even after the situation was laid out in front of him. To me, this weakened the story a bit. It wasn't what Dubus (probably) intended, the story of two people with equal stake and righteousness battling for stability. It was an unlucky woman struggling to take back what's hers from a man who refuses to do whats right.

That said, there are enough mitigating factors to make the reader at least somewhat sympathetic to Behrani. And in the end, I suppose this imbalance is rectified as he is the one to lose everything, whereas Lester and Kathy lose only most everything.

Check this out if you like Steinbeck, as Dubus' writing style reminds of his, or if you're a fan of tragedies in general. It's really quite moving and you'll be surprised at how quickly you find yourself swept up in the rise and fall of the principle characters.

Highlights: Lester's mustache, the surprisingly action-packed final act, picturing Jennifer Connelly during all of Kathy's sex scenes.
Lowlights: Behrani's recalcitrance, The inevitably depressing ending