Things We Left Unsaid by Zoya Pirzad

Zoya Pirzad had not published a new novel for twenty-two years. Her last, "We Will Get Used to It", came out in 2004, and after that nothing was heard from her until this autumn, when the Tehran publisher Jahan-e Ketab released "The People of Magnolia" in 226 pages. According to the news agency ISNA, Pirzad now lives in Armenia. Her return is a good reason to go back to the book that made her name, "Things We Left Unsaid".

The novel appeared in Persian in 2001. It won the Golshiri Foundation's prize for best novel of the year, the Yalda Literary Award and Iran's Book of the Year award, and it became one of the most widely read Persian novels of the past two decades. Franklin Lewis translated it into English, and Oneworld published it in 2012. Lewis is the same Rumi scholar we quote in this issue's article on Shams. The book has also been translated into French and German. Its Persian title means "I am the one who turns off the lights".

We look at the book through three readers who reach three different verdicts.

First the story, as the three describe it. Clarice is an Armenian woman in Abadan in the early 1960s, living in Bawarda, a district of oil company houses. Her husband, Artoush, works for the oil company, plays chess and is absorbed in politics. They have three children, the teenage Armen and twin girls. Her mother and her sister, Alice, come to the house every day. Clarice's days go to cooking, looking after the children and keeping the peace between her mother and sister. Then the Simonian family moves in across the street: a tiny, domineering grandmother, her son Emile and her granddaughter Emily. Emile reads books and listens when Clarice talks. The novel begins with the arrival of these neighbors and ends with their sudden departure.

The first angle: a novelist's praise. Shahrnush Parsipur, in a review published in the paper Shahrvand, considers the book's prizes deserved. She singles out two things. One is that the novel shows the life of Iran's Armenians without exaggeration, with their customs presented naturally. The other is that it tells of a forbidden love without once using the word love. Parsipur writes that Pirzad is sparing with words and leaves it to the reader to understand what her characters feel. She counts the scene of locusts descending on the town among the most brilliant in the book and calls the author's humor indirect and inverted. In her view hard work lies behind the simplicity of this text.

The second angle: a critic's objections. Soraya Davoodi Hamouleh, in a note for the Chouk story institute, finds Clarice a successful character, with her fears, her loneliness and her contradictions, and calls the prose plain and free of padding. But she raises several serious objections. The novel has about fifty short sections, and she finds so much division unnecessary and tiring in a story that moves in a straight line. She thinks the ending weak, because neither the people nor the time and place change. Most important, she writes that Abadan is faint in this novel. We see little of the history of oil in Khuzestan or of the town's districts, and local women are almost absent from the book. She adds that some characters remain one-dimensional and that the very simplicity of the language may not satisfy a serious reader.

The third angle: the view from outside. The Complete Review, a website devoted to literature in translation, gives the English edition a B+. Its reviewer calls the book a simple story told effectively and finds its strength in restraint and humor. The most dramatic moments, the reviewer notes, are things like a burn at the stove or the locust swarm, and we learn of Clarice's inner turmoil from small signs, such as a meal going wrong. The reviewer makes a point an Iranian reader is less likely to think of. For today's reader the book recalls a time before the compulsory veil and the restrictions that came later. The same site reports on the German press. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung saw the book's lightness as a cover for its depth, and Die Welt read Pirzad's plain, personal language as resistance to a grand, masculine style.

On one thing the three agree. Clarice is a character who stays in the memory, and Pirzad's prose is plain and clean. Where they differ is on that very plainness. Parsipur calls it art, the reviewer of The Complete Review counts it the reason for the book's success, and Davoodi Hamouleh sees it as a lack. A reader who picks the book up again can judge whether the Abadan of this novel is faint, or simply as much of the town as can be seen from Clarice's kitchen window.

The Persian edition is published by Nashr-e Markaz, and the English translation runs to 293 pages.