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Truly original, CENSORING AN IRANIAN LOVE STORY is an incredibly imaginative yet always charming love story set in contemporary Iran that crackles with wit, verve and social comment: Sara falls in love with Dara through secret messages hidden in code in the pages of books that have been outlawed, but then something quite extraordinary and unexpected happens. Through adeptly handled asides to the reader, as well as anecdotes, codes and metaphors, and cheeky references to the wonderfully rich Iranian literary heritage, the novel builds to offer a revealing yet often playful and hopeful comment on the pressures of writing within the tightly prescribed Islamic regime, pressures that naturally are heightened where affairs of the heart are concerned.
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Reviews
Rich and riveting... The absurdities of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran provide frequent moments of hilarity - typical of political satires in the tradition of Milan Kundera... Mandanipour has the potential to create a genre of Persian literature that could breach the gap in literary sensibilities that separates readers from vastly different traditions
** 'The absurdities of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran provide frequent moment of hilarity - typical of political satires in the tradition of Milan Kundera . . . Censoring an Iranian Love Story in both context and style gives us a timely glimpse of the complex and infuriatingly paradoxical society that is today's Iran . . . Mandanipour has the potential to create a genre of Persian literature that could breach the gap in literary sensibilities that separates readers from vastly different traditions
A love story that is convincingly, achingly impossible in a place where men and women cannot even look at each other in public... The effect (as every good Victorian understood) is deliriously sensual prose... Mandanipour has triumphed
** 'A playful tale . . . Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a brilliant novel about the complexities of writing and publishing in Iran
Powerful... Mandanipour's writing is exuberant, bonhomous, clever, profuse with puns and literary-political references
A brilliant novel about the complexities of writing and publishing in Iran... It will help to further understanding of the frustrating and sometimes perilous situation of the book industry in a country where copyright is not respected, where writers struggle desperately to publish and can be jailed simply for exercising their imaginations
Telling amorous tales in post-Islamic-revolution Iran is tricky, if not downright dangerous, but Mandanipour is up to the task... And as much as humor dominates the book, it quietly gets at something else - the omnipotence of tyranny
An absorbing and unique novel with a depth of feeling for words and stories in Iran... Censoring an Iranian Love Story is intriguing even before its first page
** 'Censoring an Iranian Love Story is intriguing even before its first page . . . An absorbing and unique novel with a depth of feeling for words and stories in Iran
A marvellous tale... This is a writer intoxicated with the possibilities of language, and his timely, well-translated book is about a potent love affair, not only with women, but also with words
Wry, playful... Reminiscent of Milan Kundera, this is a lively account of life and letters in contemporary Iran
** 'A marvellous tale . . . This is a writer intoxicated with the possibilities of language, and his timely, well-translated book is about a potent love affair, not only with women, but also with words
A clever Rubik's Cube of a story [and] a haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran... An Escher-like meditation on the interplay of life and art, reality and fiction... At its best, Censoring an Iranian Love Story becomes a Kundera-like rumination on philosophy and politics [that] playfully investigates the possibilities and limits of storytelling
In this brilliantly conceived and cleverly written novel, characters and author together and separately act and write with sly purpose, disguising and disavowing their subversive ends - to live, love and create in today's repressive Iranian society
This important, timely novel is sharp, playful and zesty with life
A very special novel - a passionate, inventive and humorous exposure of the stupidity and cruelty of a society ruled by fear
Devious and engaging... A droll, even cheerful portrait of totalitarian craziness