For Hedayat, neither the clergy nor the monarchy held the answers, neither the common man nor the elite intelligentsia; he was at once at odds with not just his country, as many have been quick to conclude, but his era. Sadly, one could assume he’d be no better off in this era, as he would, no doubt, like myself, be an immigrant in an exile of no foreseeable end.

After serialization in the journal Iran in 1941–1942, the history of The Blind Owl has been largely a hide and seek with authority. It was published again in 1993 but censored, banned from the 18th Tehran International Book Fair in 2005, and publication rights were withdrawn as a part of a 2006 sweeping purge. But it’s a testament to the text that it has never come close to a circulation hiatus among the people.

Was it simply the gore that made it unacceptable to the establishment? I think it was its intertwining of cultural dualities, which was quintessentially more Hedayat than any other aspect of the work. Novelistic prose did not really exist in Persian before the twentieth century, and whereas the early Iranian novels were historical novels written by academics and intellectuals, this was something altogether different from even its different status as a novel. Hedayat was, after all, pretty much bicultural, and The Blind Owl, as many have declared, is in certain ways a Western novel following and even making indentations in the European tradition. Hedayat was in many ways partially French: he attended a French school, the St. Louis missionary school in Tehran; he had a state grant to study in France, and he himself claimed he was a lifelong student of French literature; he died in Paris and was buried in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery. He was as Western as he was Eastern and the same could be said for the novel—it’s truly Middle Eastern or West Asian, one could say. And this is arguably the Iranian condition or at least its modern condition, that the left and right of Iran always feared to face—a nation of constant conquest, perpetual displacement, and exile, a country of homeland seekers with a destination only in their ancient past. Hedayat could not find solace in Tehran society and yet in Paris he could not find peace either. He was the Iranian nationalist who, fed up with the corruptions of church and state alike, was perpetually looking westward; he was also the foreigner in Europe, whose daily life was endless Visa applications and intense economic hardship, whose eyes were cast to the comforts of his mother country where he was of the aristocracy. And like these contradictions, so existed The Blind Owl, whose biggest challenge, one could assume, was that of audience—many Western literary references were lost on Iranian audiences and many Iranian folkloric descriptions were alien to Western readers, and yet the book held its place among both readerships. Influence spotting has led scholars all over the place, from the implausible to the certain, academics claiming Buddhist doctrine, Jung, Rilke, Poe, Sartre, and Kafka in its pages—but no matter what, no one denies the book is as Eastern and Western as it rejects both as well. One of the aspects of The Blind Owl that kept it alive for me while working on my own novel—a truly hyphenate work in that it is equally Iranian and American—was that it felt like our first truly hyphenate work, Hedayat embodying the first true Iranian immigrant, a both reluctant and ecstatic pioneer of the West.

Part of the agreement in setting on the journey of a truly hybridized work is accepting its polarities. With The Blind Owl, we are taught to read a novel all over again—in its pages there exists a collection of codes, variants, repetitions, cycles . . . and there is no index, glossary, footnoting, or critical-analysis consensus even. We are left alone, very alone, to read unlike we have ever read before.

We have on one hand a Gothic romance narrative and on the other hand an expressionist whodunit allegory, both equally problematized by the innovative structure: a novel in two novellas, its twin narrative sections playing for and against each other. In Part I, our narrator is a painter whose vocation is to paint a single picture on pen cases. In Part II, there is no mention of him being an artist and instead he is the confessor, a writer telling his story to, we can assume, save whatever is left of his sanity. Interestingly, the pen case holds the tools of a writer, while the first part exists as a distorted dream recollection of the second’s summarized confession of the past. In other words, the first part is the present in the form of a dream, while the second is the past in the form of a confession—and already, the algorithm is a precarious one, no doubt.

But the dualities continue. The artist of the first part, Beard notes, is immersed in a platonic love state, given the task of representing his muse, the beautiful young woman who, like an angel, appears at his door only to die in his bed. She opens her eyes for a moment within the clasp of death, apparently so our artist can render them in his art, and then she is nothing but fodder for an exhausting burial that involves one of the novel’s many old men, a sinister hearse driver. In Part II, everything is the first part’s negative: the writer is feverish from carnal love for his cheating whore-like wife who is just a door over, holding court in her bedroom, which he, the husband, banishes himself from in favor of his tomb-like room. But what is ingenious about this simple set-up is all the multiples and recyclings and variations on not just a few finite themes but a few finite images. Beard notes the novel features the same actors playing different characters over and over. We have several old men: uncle, gravedigger, odds-and-ends man, the narrator; we have several young women as well: the woman on the pen case, the woman he spies outside the ventilation hole of his home, the angel at his door, the wife, the wife’s brother, his mother.