My journey to Iran has come to an end this time. At least until book club when I get to discuss the book and get new insights. Here is however my first impression.
The book I read was My Father’s Notebook by Kader Abdolah. The book was about an deaf-mute carpet mender and his son. The story starts recounting Aga Akbar difficult life as a young deaf mute and how he came to invent his own form of cuneiform scripture to record his thoughts. Later when Aga Akbar has a family, his son Ishmael gets put in the role of being his communicator with the external world until he goes away to school and joins the underground movement against the shah. The story is told through Ishmael which is trying to write a book about his father by deciphering his cuneiform scriptures while living in exile in the Netherlands.
My Father’s Notebook by Kader Abdolah
The story and the writing felt very uneven and flawed at times. The most irritating was that Aga Akbar was a deaf-mute that supposedly only knew a simple sign language, yet he was often able to communicate all his inner thoughts quite clearly despite it being stressed in other places that they didn’t know what he was thinking. The story jumped back and forth and things were often built up to then half disappear later (eg. the cuneiform scriptures). You often felt like the book was trying to build itself up to being more than what it then managed. Not sure if this was my English translation of the book or the fact that the author wasn’t writing in his mother tongue when he wrote the original (original languages is Dutch).
What was positive about the story was the descriptions of life in Iran and the story Ishmael told about his life during the Iranian Revolution in an underground movement. The ending was also quite good. The book made you think a bit about what a difficult life people had and have in Iran but it didn’t manage to evoke the same enthusiasm in me as Persepolis did.
I give the book a three out of five stars. A plus for the story and a minus for its writing.
Now off to look for a new country to visit. Think I will go somewhere even more exotic this time…
