I had thought about death and the decomposition of all the particles in my body many times—to the extent that it didn’t frighten me—in fact, my true wish was to be completely annihilated. The only thing that frightened me was that the atoms in my body would mix with the atoms in the bodies of the vulgar. This was an insufferable thought. Sometimes I wished that after death I would have long arms and extended fingers with which I could gather all my own atoms and hold them with both hands so that the atoms that belong to me would not enter the bodies of the vulgar.

Sadeq Hedayat’s novel Blind Owl is brief, curious, and often disquieting. It tells the tale of a man who paints pen-case covers, who paints the same image again and again—and old man sitting beneath a cypress tree, an alluring young woman offering him a water lily, a stream running between them. And he is haunted by this image, and especially by the woman in this image—who may also be his wife, his cousin, his mother? The setting of the novel keeps shifting, the props in the novel keep reappearing, and the characters all seem like hazy echoes of the two figures in the painting. Chris and Suzanne try to stay grounded as they discuss this marvellous gem of Iranian modernism.

Content warning: The book contains some potentially disturbing imagery, and so does our discussion.

Thank you to Michael Collins for helping us edit this episode.

SHOW NOTES.

Next: Sadeq Hedayat: Blind Owl. [Bookshop.] (We read the translation by Sassan Tabatabai.)

Not enough of Hedayat’s other work is available in English, but see also Three Drops of Blood (a collection of short stories) and The Fable of Creation (a play).

Previous episodes that we mention: Invisible Man. Persepolis. Symposium. Paradiso. Frankenstein.

An example of a nineteenth-century painted pen case from Iran.

Lingam puja.

Edgar Allan Poe: Berenice.

Junji Ito: Frankenstein and The Enigma of Amigara Fault.

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