The Septembers of Shiraz: A Novel (P.S.)
Author(s):
Dalia Sofer
Label: Harper Perennial
Publisher(s):
Harper Perennial
Studio: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description
In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the terrors of prison, and his wife feverishly searches for him, his children struggle with the realization that their family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger.
Customer Reviews
Interesting and very informative
When I first started this book, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to read it. It has some pretty graphic torture. Since I was reading it for my book group, I stuck with it, and am very glad I did. It is a sensitive and very moving story. I recommend reading Persepolis with it.The Complete Persepolis
Exquisite
This story seemed too perfect to be made up. Either this writer is a prodigy, or the book autobiographical. Either way, you will not find a more incisively written, detail oriented depiction of what life was like in Iran after the Shah left.
The details of prison life were painful to read, and enabled one to vividly imagine the fate so many innocent people suffered.
The author escaped Iran when she was ten years old, the age of the daughter of the protagonist. How lucky we all are that she survived.
Couldn't connect with the characters
I feel like I was reading a different book than the rest of the reviewers. To me, the characters were all distant and hard to connect with, which made it hard for me to feel an investment in their evolutions or futures. The most compelling character and the story I was most interested in was the subplot about the daughter and the files. She was the only character that felt real to me. I would have liked to read more about her, but the rest of the family I could take or leave. Had I not been on a plane when reading it, I probably wouldn't have finished the book, and I finish everything.
Did I read the same book as everyone else?
After looking at the rave reviews for The Septembers of Shiraz, I chose it as my book club selection. Now I'm wondering what all the hype was about? While I find the subject matter compelling and heartbreaking, I found the writing and book to be neither. The characters lacked depth and were 2 dimensional at best, the ending was contrived and way too simplistic, and I felt as though I were hearing the story from someone who'd heard it second hand. When I finished the novel, I read "about the author," and it turns out I was right- I was hearing it third hand.
I had high hopes for this book, and I was very dissappointed.
Compelling and personal tale, but not very well-written
The Septembers of Shiraz is a 3 1/2 star book that I would have upgraded to 4 stars if immediately after finishing it I hadn't started reading Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq. Both books are based on the personal stories of the authors' fathers, each of whom ended up emmigrating from the Middle East with his family as a result of religious and cultural persecution. This book is written as a novel, and Sabar's is non-fiction, but the greatest dissimilarity is in the quality of the writing. And that is where "The Septembers of Shiraz" comes up short.
This book, about an Iranian Jewish family during the cultural revolution which brought the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic fundamentalists to power, is divided into the points of view of the four family members: Isaac Amin, a wealthy jeweler, his wife, Farnaz, their daughter Shirin, and their son, Parviz. Isaac is jailed on charges of being a Zionist and his wife and daughter must try to cope in a Tehran in which the lower classes have power for the first time in their lives. Parviz, in the weakest of the tales, is studying at university in New York and living with a family of Hasidic Jews.
You can tell on reading the book that the tale is deeply personal to the author and one which she researched rigorously, from the conditions in Iranian prisons to what life was like for ordinary people during the revolution. It's also one that needs to be told. If you know nothing about the Islamic revolution in Iran, the book is likely to be compelling. But chapters don't so much end as they just stop abruptly, sections are written in the wrong tense, and for these and other reasons I can't quite put my finger on, I found myself picking the book up and putting it down again a few pages later, whereas I read over half of Safar's book in one sitting.
Sofer can perhaps be forgiven some of the clunky writing in that English is not her first language. But then it isn't Khaled Hosseini's first language either, and both The Kite Runner and One Thousand Splendid Suns are gorgeously written. If you want to learn about what was lost in the cultural revolution in Iran and read just one book about it, even Reading Lolita in Tehran, which makes what was lost in the revolution more poignant still, would be a better choice. Sofer has made a good first effort and one which is worth reading, just with lower expectations that those which the other reviews here might give you. Perhaps I'm less moved by the book than I ought to be because while Sofer makes you feel the pain of the Amin family and what they have lost, she never really gives you a sense of greater context. But I just finished the book today and it's already starting to slip away in the face of a tale (Safar's) that is full of more detail, more history and that broader context and is, somehow, more moving.
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