BOOKS
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are more interesting than they would be at home, that is only
because they steal into different selves abroad, gathering secrets and
prompting speculations.
In
the helter-skelter confusion of Iran in
1979, everyone is strange to everybody else, and everyone is suspect.
Iranians watch Americans watching Iranians, none of them know–
ing who is Savak and who C.I.A., all of them assuming only the
worst. By day, the Americans move through a prefabricated world of
coffee and gossip; by night, they are alone again, and uncomfortably
aware of shadowy presences at the edge of their vision - a figure at a
window, a corpse in the dust, wild dogs howling in the dark.
With these penumbral shapes seeping across the Americans' vi–
sion, as ineluctable as blood across a Kleenex, the novel slowly
gathers momentum until, very suddenly, in an extraordinary
twenty-five-page scene at the ruins of Persepolis, the Iranian world
once and for all blots out the American. Suddenly, the lights go
dead, and the American sightseers who have come to watch a sound–
and-light show are lost, separated from one another, alone in the
dark. Through the long and vertiginous hours that follow, the
tourists can only cower in the desert, listening to footsteps, distant
calls for help, the occasional sound of gunfire. By the time the light
has returned, unknown local forces are shooting it out down below,
while the visitors remain crouched behind their rocks, guiltily aware
of how much they should be doing and how little they really can do.
And suddenly, by the end of this wild and remarkable scene,
Persian Nights
has been transformed from a mild Forsterian comedy
of manners into a palpitating drama. Suddenly the Islamic Revolu–
tion is no longer just an exciting topic for faculty-club discussion, but
a deadly political struggle with stakes far deeper than the visitors can
fathom. And suddenly, the blithe illusions that the Americans have
smuggled in through customs are exploding in their faces, as their
casual inability to distinguish one Iranian from another becomes a
terrifying inability to separate good from bad.
All the visitors, then, undergo their own kind of Revolution.
Chloe, for example, has until now grown steadily more Iran–
ian-slower, more sensuous, dense with secrets; she has even taken
to wearing a veil. After Persepolis, however, she is suddenly aware
that the veil is not just an exotic kind of sexual aid, but also a set of
blinders; it makes her unseeing as well as unseen. And as she is
swept up in the country's turmoil, in Tehran for the first time, sur–
rounded for the first time by everyday Iranians, and out in the
