By coincidence I read this book last week when the United States Congress voted on last July’s nuclear agreement with Iran. Iran is still the center of Americans’ overseas attention in the Middle East, considered part of an “axis of evil,” as President George W. Bush once stated. This novel will no doubt play into that image. Children of the Jacaranda Tree is set in post-revolutionary Iran, from 1983 to 2011 (the book was published in 2013) a time of turmoil in the country, including an inconclusive and bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s and unrest toward the revolutionaries in 2009-11. The book shows the disillusionment of many Iranians who hailed the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 but were oppressed by the Ayatollah Khomeini and later regimes that betrayed them. It is also the debut novel of Sahir Delijani. Children of the Jacaranda Tree follows several characters, including one child born in Tehran’s Evid Prison to a couple jailed for their political beliefs. Delijani, an Iranian born in Evid Prison herself in 1983, writes from first-hand experiences and perfectly conveys the sense of terror of post-revolutionary Iran. Many of these children survived the violent purge inside Tehran’s prisons during the late 1980s to have children of their own and face revolutionary upheaval in 2009-11. Although Delijani creates sympathetic characters, she has so many of them it is often hard to keep track. The novel often jumps back and forth in time, making it more confusing with the numerous characters. A better book (in my opinion) about Iran in roughly the same period (up to 2003) is Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. Reading Lolita, a literary biography, is concerned with an Iranian professor of English whose classes read Western literature considered “evil” by the Islamic Republic. Both books give the reader a sense of life in revolutionary Iran and where the country might be headed. TS
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CategoriesAuthorTom Schmidt lives in Prescott Valley, AZ. Archives
October 2018
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October 2018
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