The Blind Owl in The Roundtable

Apr 03, 2019 Pamela rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: boxall-1001-read, short-stories, favorites

This bleak but brilliant collection of stories opens with Hedayat's best-known work, 'The Blind Owl', a surreal tale of love and death. The narrative is circular and intense, with recurring themes and images that relate to all the senses - a girl bites her nails, drunken soldiers sing a particular song, the taste of bitter cucumber lingers on the skin - as the reader tries to distinguish truth from illusion, or insanity. It is powerful and puzzling, a great opener to the collection.

For its moder This bleak but brilliant collection of stories opens with Hedayat's best-known work, 'The Blind Owl', a surreal tale of love and death. The narrative is circular and intense, with recurring themes and images that relate to all the senses - a girl bites her nails, drunken soldiers sing a particular song, the taste of bitter cucumber lingers on the skin - as the reader tries to distinguish truth from illusion, or insanity. It is powerful and puzzling, a great opener to the collection.

For its modernity and surreal use of imagery, 'The Blind Owl' is justly considered a masterpiece. However, I tend to prefer tales written in a realist style, and I really enjoyed the way Hedayat combined realist narrative with a twist of the psychological in many of his other stories (the Introduction refers to these as 'psycho-fictional' which I feel gives a good indication of their effect). The setting for most of the stories is Iran - two are set among the Iranian community in France -and Hedayat weaves the old myths and modern customs of the country into the blighted lives of his characters. The clash between old and new features in many of these stories, unresolved but unavoidable in its impact on ordinary lives.

My favourite stories in this collection were 'Whirlpool' - a tale of infidelity (real or imagined) - and 'Davoud the Hunchback'. 'The Stray Dog' was also brilliantly written, but very sad and so too painful for me to dwell on - in fact, animals do not fare any better than humans in Hedayat's world, their hopes are equally shattered and they face the same bewildering and unjust cruelty. Those readers who flinch from animal cruelty may find some of these stories hard to confront.

Overall, the collection presents a dark and sometimes depressing view of life that is at the same time beautifully written, rich and compelling. The Introduction quotes from one of Hedayat's letters "One must struggle in this cataract of shit until disgust with living suffocates us." This despair, which ultimately led to the writer taking his own life in Paris in 1951, permeates much of this collection of stories. It is a challenging read, but a very worthwhile one. ...more

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Jun 10, 2008 El rated it liked it

Shelves: 20th-centurylit-late

The narrator of this Persian story is in a mental descent. As he slips into insanity the reader slips with him, similar in tone to Dostoevsky (more popularily compared to Poe, perhaps to make a safe, Western connection). There is repetition of images and symbols, at times distracting, but more often implemental in showing the utter breakdown of the narrator's mind. He is chased through an opiate labyrinth of thoughts, stuck between the Good and the Evil; personally knowing nothing about the auth ...more

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