It is, first of all, a novel that demands countless readings; it demands that you become a student of it. As I became a novelist in my own right, I grew less afraid of its powers and more attune to its mechanics, but I never stopped feeling wholly humbled by its profoundly radical aesthetics. And Sadegh Hedayat, who I learned more and more about, became one of my most cherished literary icons.

Which is why I was ecstatic and overwhelmed to introduce Western audiences to the new edition of D. P. Costello’s 1957 translation. Of course, my first thought was that it seemed embarrassing that I’d even be a liaison in this mission—I could imagine Hedayat rolling his eyes at me through his thick black-framed spectacles and wisecracking something along those lines. I thought of the judgment of every Iranian I knew who, without a blink of an eye, would swear ultimate allegiance to The Blind Owl. It is that type of national treasure that elicits the most indeed-blind unconditional ardor. Even if they don’t stand behind certain story line special effects or are confounded by its many baffling twists and turns, they consider it very much theirs; Hedayat feels so much in our blood that it’s hard to remember he came to be in Iran and not the other way around.

Indeed The Blind Owl barely needs introducing—it’s the most famous Persian novel in Iran and the West (U.S. and Europe), and Hedayat is without argument the father of Persian modernist fiction. But The Blind Owl’s revolutionary surrealism is the exception to even Hedayat’s own rules, as most of his stories are in the realist vein, often wryly comic in satiric works or resolutely nostalgic in nationalist-realist works. It is not an easy read and yet, against all odds, it is the most renowned literary work of twentieth-century Iran, unreadable to the masses, one would assume, with its opaque symbolism, corkscrewed coding, warped psychological landscape, and otherworldly thematics. But Hedayat’s prose has always been accessible in its simple style, much like Edgar Allen Poe—his closest Western kin, along with Kafka, one can argue, both of whom he held in high regard—who is often taught in American middle school. Perhaps the very prose, coupled with its fabled notoriety, has made it an essential literary hand-me-down in Iran. I’d like to think the Iranian disposition is simply more all-embracing of the experimental in art, as well as more inviting of investigations into the darkest crevices of the human soul.

But for whatever reason, it is one of Hedayat’s only forays into such horror. It is a masterpiece of what eminent Hedayat scholar Homa Katouzian calls “psycho-fiction”—that which “reflects the essentially subjective nature of the stories, which bring together the psychological, ontological, and metaphysical in an indivisible whole.” In that way it feels like his most “real” work, even in its almost mystical fabulism. It feels as if it exists independently of its author, as if it were a relic, without tangible attribution, like a holy scripture, a certain unearthly authenticity reaffirmed by the rawness of its feverish confessional tone—and parallels to Hedayat’s bio, of course. And that, of course, renders this frightening tale all the more frightening.

In the end, the book only reflects certain elements of Hedayat’s life. There is the perpetual haze of opium which, based on whatever account you subscribe to, Hedayat was an occasional dabbler or a hopeless addict. And there is, of course, Hedayat’s fascination with India—he studied Middle Persian in Bombay, where he apparently penned The Blind Owl—in the core myth of the narrative, the chilling “trial by cobra,” which the half-Indian narrator’s Hindu dancer mother, Bugam Dasi (the novel’s only named character), initiates, igniting the whole nightmare premise of story. And there is Hedayat’s vegetarianism, which he fully dedicated himself to in India, portrayed in the novel’s herbivoric undertones by the narrator’s consternation over the routine sight of a local butcher at work. And there is Hedayat’s notoriously asexual or homosexual bachelorhood—again depending on which account you subscribe to—in the novel’s sexual anxieties and impotency qualms with multiple images of stunted virility, from various stills of lascivious and yet unsatisfying elderly male lovers to ultimately the novel’s climax, which, as brilliant Hedayat scholar Michael Beard points out, is an actual climax involving a knife taking over what the organic phallus fails to fulfill.

And, of course, there is the sense of an eternally alienated outsider’s cast on the whole novel, a despair we know was definitely Hedayat’s, which likely led to his suicide by gassing himself in 1951. He carried an inconsolable loneliness in walking through the world as well as in the artistic rendering of it. Hedayat’s narrator is either representing his nightmare through painting or by confessing it through writing, but in either case he lets us know that the creative act is his way of dialoguing with his shadow. . . which Beard skillfully points out could very well be us, the audience beholding the narrator’s, as well as Hedayat’s, art.

Everything else, we could say, is a fiction, rooted in sources so entirely mysterious that indeed The Blind Owl, while feeling “real,” seems to be born of a world all its own, a tale far beyond the experience of its author, any author—certainly, luckily.

Hedayat was thirty-three when the work was first self-published in India, its initial incarnation being fifty copies of handwritten text distributed for circulation among friends with a “not for sale in Iran” note on it, due to Hedayat’s initial discouraging encounters with Iranian censors. Iran, two and a half decades after its Constitutional Revolution, and a decade after the tail-end of the Qajar dynasty and the beginning of the Pahlavi dynasty with the establishment of Reza Shah’s reign, had experienced rapid authoritarian modernization and secularization with the British and the Russians salivating over the prospect of Iranian oil, while the Shah’s regime created invisible shackles over the masses through propaganda and censorship. This was how Iran turned Western and fast, a place where Islamic traditionalism and Western modernization were at a tug-of-war. This era of cultural crossroads heralded many decades of such awkward seesawing of old and new, tradition and progress, crises of identity of which Iran still, clearly, is deeply embroiled.