One imagines the censor’s pen laboriously marking up the most interesting parts of the story. Mandanipour uses the clever gimmick of striking out controversial words, sentences, even paragraphs, so that the reader has to not only read between the lines to decipher the true meaning of conversations and descriptions, he must read behind the lines, as it were.
Using code and their wits to find ways to communicate when society prohibits their interaction, Dara and Sara take increasingly greater risks in their attempts to know one another. To the authorities within the novel, Iranian authors in general have a grave responsibility to the people who may encounter their stories “He must not allow immoral and corruptive words and phrases to appear before the eyes of simple and innocent people, especially the youth, and pollute their pure minds.” To the narrator of Mandanipour’s story, represented as though he is the author himself, this is a betrayal of the complexities of the human experience.ĭara and Sara, two young people in modern Tehran, form a connection through a shared love of banned (and therefore fascinating) literature. A few chapters in, he remarks, “for you to fully discern the symbols and metaphors of my story, I am forced to introduce you to yet another form of censorship - socio-cultural censorship - which in Iran has a history of more than 2,000 years.” Mandanipour’s narrator strives throughout to educate the reader about Iranian culture and literature, as well as to tell the story of two young lovers.
And euphemisms abound, so that a poem about ripe fruit or a flowering plant becomes quite graphic in classically styled Iranian literature. It actually turns out that hints are worse than flagrant descriptions the human imagination has more power to cross the boundaries into restricted territory than the pen.
If a story even hints of sexuality or improper behavior, it has little to no chance of reaching the reading public without severe alteration.īut these days, with all my being, as a will and last testament, I want to write a bright love story in which there is no sorrow, no one dies, no hearts suffer, not even the tip of a pencil breaks. Shahriar Mandanipour, in his first major work to be translated into English, tells a story of love, secrecy, jealousy, and political danger while simultaneously walking the reader through the difficulties of obtaining a publishing permit in Iran. And few things more complicated than writing a story about love. There’s nothing simple about penning a story in Iran.
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