Scenes also mirror one another, just as action and art imitate each other; the scene on the pen case reflects the scene outside the ventilation hole, which mirrors the scene on an ancient jar unearthed at the girl’s burial in the first part, which mirrors his mother’s final dance. Not only is this style simply dazzling in its innovation, it points to an opposite effect—recycled communal imagery that implies a certain paucity of the imagination or miserly economy of action or, just simply, tiring reworkings of a scenario for it’s own sake. Such rearranging, scrambling, and skewing of an already sleek novel’s minimalist furnishings is just not done in fiction, then or now or ever, we can assume. It requires, at its very least, the closest of multiple readings and, at its very most, conscientious code-breaking dissection.

In referencing Michael Beard so many times, I think it’s important to point out he wrote perhaps the greatest study of the novel, Hedayat’s Blind Owl as a Western Novel. It inspired me to write to him and ask how he came about discovering this book. It was apparently while he was in Peace Corps training in Iran. “I had a fever the evening I read it. I had recently picked it up in the reading room and figured it might be a good companion. It was a perfect companion. Alone, late at night in an unfamiliar place I felt in tune with it. It was a seductive book even before I understood it. The memory of it lingered after we went to our sites (I was teaching high school in Rafsanjan, then a small town). In Peace Corps pedagogy you speak before you can read, and as I was slowly becoming literate in Persian, it was one of my textbooks. I began to read it slowly, with a dictionary at hand, and it became one more teacher.” Beard went on to write that when working on his dissertation on it, many years later, he “became very interested in the elegant way Hedayat rethought European traditions.”

What he concluded our exchange with interested me most, a sentiment absent from his seminal book: “Later I began to think about Hedayat in biographical terms. I have no doubt that melancholy ingrained in his character led to his suicide, but I also believe that there is an exuberance in his writing that counteracts it. The expression of melancholy is not the same thing as melancholy. It may hold melancholy at arm’s length.”

This, I think, is the key to appreciating the nightmare-scape of The Blind Owl, once you piece its puzzles, catch on to its games, and read by its rules. The prose contains an energy that reminds one that even though Hedayat was quite depressed for much of his life, he was also the man spotted holding court in various cafés in Paris and Tehran alike, always entertaining huge groups of friends and followers and everything in between. We can see in this book, as well as in all his writing, not what might be implicated in his untimely death, but what prevented it for so long. And this is why I believe no reader could, as the myth went, contemplate death at their own hands after reading it—The Blind Owl is not a triumph of story, it’s a triumph of art. It doesn’t tell you how to live or die, but it does teach you a few things about how to create. And what is more life-affirming than that?

Only years and years after my father forbade me to read it and eventually gave in, did I understand that all the fuss might have been a personal one as well. After all, I came to see myself as not a successor or descendent even, but as a child of Hedayat—and almost literally, as my father had more than a few similarities with Hedayat. He too was an adamant Middle Persian hobbyist and Zoroastrianism enthusiast who endlessly romanticized pre-Islamic Persia to the point where the walls of our living room were entirely plastered with color-copied clippings out of Smithsonian magazine, featuring Sasanian plates and Achaemenid relief images. Plus, it was his vegetarian tendencies that made a vegetarian out of me. He was not a writer, of course, but he made one out of me. Not to mention he raised a pensive, brooding, loner kid who never felt quite at home in her imagined there or her literal here. And so, of course, it had to be him who kept me from reading it for so long.

Given the usefulness of his tactics with respect to that, I’ll then pass on what got me to these pages: refrain, reader, from reading this book, whatever you do.

You’ve been warned.

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THERE ARE SORES WHICH SLOWLY ERODE THE MIND IN solitude like a kind of canker.

It is impossible to convey a just idea of the agony which this disease can inflict. In general, people are apt to relegate such inconceivable sufferings to the category of the incredible. Any mention of them in conversation or in writing is considered in the light of current beliefs, the individual’s personal beliefs in particular, and tends to provoke a smile of incredulity and derision.