The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree by Farnoosh Moshiri

The-Crazy-Dervish-and-the-Pomegranate-Tree-by-Farnoosh-Moshiri

Description

The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree by Farnoosh Moshiri
ISBN 978-0930773700

In the dozen stories in The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree, Farnoosh Moshiri combines social and political insight with the mythology of her native Iran. Her earlier books, At the Wall of the Almighty and The Bathhouse (which also won the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction), were both set in Iran. The Crazy Dervish is set both in Iran and the United States. Several of the stories are concerned with the the poverty and loss of status and identity that immigrants often endure. Unlike most immigrant stories, The Crazy Dervish deals equally with the violence and political repression visited upon those who would emigrate during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran.

Reviews

Moshiri follows her powerful novels of the Islamic revolution in Iran, At the Wall of the Almighty (2000) and The Bathhouse (2001), with a dozen stories over which the revolution malignantly hovers. In “The Wall,” 12 blindfolded men are driven to a wall and lined up facing it; they stand a while, some faint, then they are driven back. “A couple of us were wet with pee and vomit,” says the narrator. In “Crossing,” a woman works out at the club, watched by a man who is betimes raven-black-haired, graying, or completely whitened; she remembers crossing busy streets holding his hand when she was eight, the tricks he played on her in the last years, after the stroke. The flood of fear that was the revolution terrified at the time and chillingly laps at its survivors’ consciousness 20 years later and thousands of miles from its immediate devastation. The struggle to understand continues, and the last stories in the book tell fables about it that gleam with wonder and, alas, with blood.

—Booklist, Ray Olson, Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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