Review: Censoring an Iranian Love Story – Shahriar Mandanipour

It is well known that Iran is a country in which fundamentalist Islam vies with a more liberal culture for the hearts and minds of its population.  Once, a westernised nation under the long-deposed Shah, it underwent an Islamic revolution in the late 1970s which saw its laws becoming antagonistic towards non-Islamic values.  The lives of artists and writers who sought to express themselves beyond the confines of the prevailing faith became impossible and many emigrated to the West.  The prize-winning author of Censoring an Iranian Love Story, Shariar Mandanipour is one such having been unable to publish his books in Iran due to censorship – see his entry on Wikipedia to his academic career since residing in America,

Censoring an Iranian Love Story is one of the most unusual books I have read recently and is very difficult to classify.  A love story is contained within it, but solely as a vehicle for the author to write an extended set of stories and personal accounts about life in Iran, and particularly the censorship of artistic works. It is full of irony and humour and makes one want to weep for those Iranians who have to live under the current regime while not agreeing with its ethos.

Of course, censorship does not actually exist in Iran! -

The new constitution allows the printing and publishing of any and all books and journals and strictly prohibits their censorship and inpection.  Unfortunately however, our constitution makes no mention of these books and publications being allowed to leave the print shop.

Shariar Mandanipour describes how this means that publishers have to invest in a print run before they actually know whether their books will be allowed to be distributed to book-shops.  Inspectors certainly do exist, and for the purpose of this book, Shariar Mandanipour creates one such, who he names Porfiry Petrovich, the detective in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment charged with solving Raskolnikov’s murders.  In fact, as Mary Whipple pointed out in her review, “Mandanipour has created a “novel” so rich with ideas, cultural history, and literary references – to writers such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, Kafka, and Malraux”.

The author then goes on to write a love story, paragraph by paragraph, explaining what the censor will say about each sentence and how the author is going to have change his story to enable it to pass.  Of course, in an Islamic nation like Iran, you can’t even write about a boy and girl being alone in a room together.  An author can’t describe their emotions or their appearance other than in the most general terms.  Gradually we realise that it is in fact impossible to write a love story at all, for the only acceptable relationships between a boy and a girl are those which have been set up by their parents are are fully chaperoned at every stage.

However, Mandanipour writes the story for we Western readers and crosses out the passages which Petrovich is going to delete.  In between the short passages of the developing love story he tells other stories about Iran, about censorship, about art and love – the book becoming a dialogue with the reader in a thoroughly engaging way.

We read much about Iran through these many stories, some fictional and some based in real life.  Every aspect of life is subject to surveillance by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and a whole network of informers who are happy to report their relatives and neighbours for even the most minor infringement of the prevailing codes.  Teams from the  Ministry can descend on any social gathering to see if alcohol is being drunk or other alleged abuses are taking place.  The penalties for infringement are terrifying with beatings and whipping being commonplace. The surveillance seems to be as bad or worse than anything that happened in fascist or communist regimes and leads to disappearances with little hope of return for those who are lost in the system.

Having set up the two lovers, Sara and Dara, Mandanipour has an extremely difficult job allowing them to even speak together let alone progress their relationship.  At one point in their story, the only place they can find to meet is in a hospital emergency room, where it seems unlikely that anyone else would imagine they are meeting as a couple simply in order to talk together.

Throughout this process of writing the story, the author debates with the imaginary Petrovich, and over the course of the novel he emerges as a powerful personality but with a wholly misguided approach to life.  Mandanipour writes the lines,

Sara’s heart grows heavier from one moment to the next.  Its beating slows . . .

and Petrovich interjects,

Wait!  What is going on?  There seem to be things happening in your story that I can’t see. There seem to be unseemly things going on in between those three dots.  Why has Sara’s heart slowed down?

The author replies,

Sir!  Your instincts don’t always tell you the truth. There is nothing going on. Dara is still rubbing the dust from the sole of Sara’s sandal between his fingers.  And Sara’s heart, like everyone else’s sometimes beats fast, sometimes beats slow.

By this stage the reader has realised how difficult it is to write a story in a culture in which censorship has become so ingrained that the author has actually internalised the censor so that as he writes, he can feel the judgement on his words going on in real time.  We can only pity those vast numbers of Iranians who have to live with this engrained self-assessment of  their art which has been imposed on them by a set of values that reject their artistic expressions.

Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a remarkable book.  I came to it thinking that it was going to be a romance, but I found a challenging book which shows the predicament of the artist living in a culture which rejects his art as a great evil.  We learn much about the historic culture of Iran and its ancient traditions of art and literature, and can only share Mandanipour’s sorrow that only ancient texts and traditional music are freely allowed in the country.  How many other writers excellent are yet to be published in translation from nations where censorship prevails?  This is only the first book of Mandanipour’s to be published in English and I can only wait in hope that other’s follow.  Finally I must credit the author’s translator, Sara Khalili for a very readable text.

Note – this is a review of the American edition.  The British edition is not published until February 2011 and can be pre-ordered here

Other book bloggers’ reviews
Mary Whipple’s Seeing the World Through Books – to whom I am grateful for bringing this book to my attention