Along with this trio of deeply flawed mother figures, Aria’s life intersects with those who will become communists, senior revolutionary guards and human rights lawyers.Ī pleasingly restless narrative of shifting viewpoints, it always finds its way back to Aria. Fereshteh also makes her visit Mehri, a poor woman, to give her daughters weekly reading lessons. For many in this powerful novel – women especially – the pains dominate.Īria’s early years are spent with Behrouz’s abusive wife, Zahra, but when she’s seven, she’s taken in by a wealthy childless woman named Fereshteh, who sends her to school.
“I’ll name you Aria, after all the world’s pains and all the world’s loves,” he pledges. Behrouz Bakhtiar is walking home through moonlit snow one night when he finds a baby, just a few days old, abandoned beneath a mulberry tree. This is a metropolis that might well have swallowed Aria up as a newborn were it not for a kindly army driver. Tehran’s ancient courtyards, alleyways and maze-like bazaars guard its secrets Tehran’s architecture of ancient courtyards, alleyways and maze-like bazaars guards its secrets even from the fabled Alborz mountains that rise up above it. International influences vie with tradition, and while women avert their eyes from the male gaze in the south, in the north they walk with their heads held high and their shoulders back, preferring miniskirts to the veil.
Even so, it’s the story’s backdrop, Tehran, that is the book’s standout character.Ī city of two halves with its impoverished south and affluent north, Tehran is home to Baha’is, Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews, as well as Muslims of varying degrees of devoutness.
Aria is a defiant, spirited child who’s set to embark upon an odyssey across Iran’s social and religious divides, one whose defining forces illuminate the nation’s rich, complex past as well as the tensions that will fuel its violent future transformation. B eginning in 1953 and closing in the wake of the Iranian revolution, Nazanine Hozar’s epic novel is named after its heroine.
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