Reviewers loved this book, calling it a ‘dazzling debut.’ I call it annoying. I feel bad to say it, because it is so hard to get published, and I don’t doubt it has many merits, but it just wasn’t for me. I pushed on for about 200 pages but then I just had to bail.
It’s about a man in Indiana who is loosely aspirational in academia but is not getting anywhere because he is drinking too much. He is toying -i n an annoying, apathetic way – with writing a book on martyrdom, because he wants his eventual death to ‘mean something.’ Leaving aside this is a stupid goal right off the bat, it is all wrapped up with the fact that he was born in Iran. He has never lived in Iran, mind you, but still much of the book is given over to his various thoughts about his ‘heritage,’ intercut with descriptions of the experience of his immediate family in Iran. Usually if you read a book about a country by someone from that country, it increases your understanding of it; this was just the reverse. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book by someone ‘from’ a country that actually went ahead and exoticized that country. Perhaps it’s because that ‘from,’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let me stop typing though, this post is already bad-tempered enough, which is probably not very fair.