Houri

by Mehrdad Balali Narrated by Elias Khalil

Overview

Three years after the Revolution, Tehran looks like a boneyard. Shahed has returned from California to his homeland to face the ghost of his father, to find out who betrayed him as a child, to recover something that might make him feel alive. Witnessing the brutalities of militant fundamentalists, he wishes his exuberant hustler of a father were alive again to kick the mullahs and their vicious crusade out of Iran. Shahed conjures up his life as a twelve-year-old, superimposing on the grim streets the bizarre exploits of his lusty father and his crazy cohorts in the days of the Shah. He sees again his long-suffering mother, Uncle E the opium addict, the massive butcher, Taj the idiot . . . and most vividly of all the seductress Houri, tantalizing nymph of his childhood fantasies.

Now he must weigh the past, its dreams and crimes, excitement and betrayal, against the desolation of the present.
Mehrdad Balali combines a gripping father-son rivalry with a stark contrast of Iran under the Shah, and in the troubled years following the Revolution. Islamic culture unfolds through details of family relations, feasts and rites, circumcision, women' s roles and the vibrancy of everyday life for the poor in a country with thousands of years of history.

Houri brings alive an alien milieu few Americans understand the subjection of an entire country to the horrors of religious fundamentalist rule. Yet it portrays a universal story older than nations: that of the bitter struggle and harsh love between father and son.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

An autobiographical novel that looks at changes in Iran between the late 1960s and the early 1980s through the eyes of a 12-year-old Iranian boy and the boy as a man some 14 years later. Having immigrated to California, Shahed returns to Tehran after his father's death, hoping to make sense of their relationship. Shahed's memories of his childhood in a freer, more secular Iran under the Shah alternate (sometimes abruptly) with his experiences of the country after the fundamentalist Islamic Revolution where Q-tips are “objects of bourgeois luxury.” The childhood scenes are sharply rendered. Baba, Shahed's father, is a selfish, greedy spendthrift and perpetual debtor who literally takes food off Shahed's plate; other men fare no better, from Shahed's opium-addict uncle “E” to a school principal who uses his blindness as an excuse to grope schoolgirls. But then there's the houri (Persian for “nymph of paradise”) of the title, the sexy, wealthy neighbor who was the object of the preteen Shahed's fantasies. Iran's struggles under a repressive regime provide the backdrop to this revealing story, but the book succeeds more as a fictionalized memoir. (Dec.)

Kirkus Reviews

Journalist Balali's bitter first novel about Iran, from which he is now banned, contrasts his native country before and after the Islamic revolution. Shahed's family sent him to the United States to study, but he has actually been working a dead end job at a gas station. He returns to Iran to see his mother on the third anniversary of his father's death, which also happens to be the third anniversary of the revolution. The fearful, drab Iran that the Americanized Shahed visits is a shell of the lively world he remembers. There are public hangings and beatings for small infractions of the strict new religious/social code. Even religious holidays are no longer the joyous, playful occasions of his childhood. But not all Shahed's memories of pre-revolutionary days are nostalgic. His father tyrannized his family just as the shah dominated Iran's corrupt society. Baba was a gambling womanizer who frittered away his inheritance, beat his wife and offset his usual cruelty and neglect with brief, albeit intense displays of affection and generosity. His son has never forgiven Baba for his affair with Houri, the object of Shahed's first adolescent longing. (Her name gives the novel its ironic title, which also refers to the heavenly virgins Islam promises to the righteous.) While recalling his younger years, Shahed also thinks about his former girlfriend in California, whose death promoted his return to Iran. His portrait of their overwrought, one-dimensional relationship self-consciously demonstrates how his father's behavior stunted his emotional life. The coarse language Shahed uses to describe women can be off-putting, and the California scenes lack the authenticity of his childhood memories,though they're frequently just as ugly. Comparisons to The Kite Runner are unavoidable, but unlike that novel of exile and return, Houri offers no suggestion of potential redemption.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178066775
Publisher:	Everand Productions
Publication date:	01/24/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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