Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour

Their trysts, which create satirical and at times tragic scenes, gradually, impact their love negatively. Despite their fears and trepidations, the young couple use creative ploys to communicate and meet-they correspond by coding letters in books they borrow from a public library, they meet in the emergency room of a hospital, and even in a mosque. But at a time when gender separation is forcefully imposed on the society, and in all public venues the omnipresent patrols from the Campaign against Social Corruption (Gašt-e mobāreza bā mafāsed-e ejtemāʿi) arrest young couples who display any degree of closeness and friendship, being in love and carrying on a romantic relationship in the Islamic Republic of Iran is unlike what is customary in many countries. They see one another in the midst of a political protest by students opposing the government, and fall in love. Sara is a student of literature at Tehran University, and Dara is a former political prisoner who for this very reason has been expelled from the same university. In the first storyline, Madanipour tells the love story of Dara (Dārā), and Sara (Sārā), whose names he has chosen from first-grade textbooks that were pulped right after the Islamic Revolution. in 1990.Ĭensoring an Iranian Love Story, “ a brilliant novel about the frustrating and sometimes perilous situation of the book industry in a country, in which both writer and censor appear as fictional characters,” (Kamali Dehghan ) consists of two separate yet intricately interwoven plots.

Preceding the publication of its Persian original by over a decade (Sweden, 2001), Šāh-e siāh-pušān by Hušang Golširi (1938-2000) was translated by Abbas Milani as King of the Benighted and was first published under the pseudonym Manuchehr Irani in Washington D.C. 1058-67).Ĭensoring an Iranian Love Story is the second novel written by an Iranian novelist, which has first appeared in English translation. Among Mandanipour’s most noted books in Persian are, M ūm iā va ʿasal ( Mummy and honey, 1997) and the two-volume novel Del-e deldādegi ( The courage of love, 1998 For a descriptive analysis of Mandanipour’s fiction see Ḥassan Mirʿābedini, Ṣad sāl dāstān-nevisi dar Iran (A hundred years of fiction writing in Iran), Tehran, 1987-98, vol. He spent the following two years as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, and in 2009 he was a Visiting Writer at Boston College. Mandanipour came to the United States in 2006 as the third International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

The novel, translated by Sara Khalili (Sārā Ḵ alili), has not been published in its original Persian. CENSORING AN IRANIAN LOVE STORY ( New York, 2009), the first novel published in English by noted modernist writer Shahriar Mandanipour (Šahryār Mandanīpūr, b.

Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour