The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali is such a dramatic story of broken hearts and miscommunication and that absurdity of destiny which is not meant to be. I avoid usually to read such stories as I have enough of real life memories, but Marjan Kamali charmed me with Together Tea and was expecting this book to be a good companion for some busy days doing my administrative chores (I´ve listen to the audiobook). Far from that...
After 60 years of physical separation, Roya meets his first and biggest love of her life, Bahman Aslan, that he met first in a stationery shop in Tehran, Iran. They were supposed to get married but the events that brought the desmise of the then prime minister Mossadegh and the complicated family nets made the marriage impossible. Roya left for America to study and find relief, and got married to an American man. She will meet Bahman, ´the boy who wanted to save the world´, in America in a care home and spending his last days spending time together. Then, she will find out what actually happened in those days. It was not only that Bahman decided to leave her and marry someone else, for the sake of his mentally instable mother, but she was lied and letters were sent to her aiming to put an end to their relationship.
The moment of the late confession hasn´t changed anything. Both of them made their separate lives, although not as they were expected too. Roya did not ended up as a successful woman scientist and Bahman gave up his revolutionary plans for a life of financial stability for his family. However, at least the two of them reached a certain peace of mind, after so many years of torments of the heart.
The story goes back and forth, from a timeline to another, sharing different voices of the characters. This choice of storytelling gives depth and diversity to the story and creates a lively conversation across time between them.
Indeed, we are living in so superficial times, when the so-called ´me time´ are an excuse to give up people that may matter and some may find easier to live on their own because are dried inside and in a self-imposed emotional quarantine. The Stationery Shop is not a happy story because life is not a happy story in general, but at least, it is about people who realized that no matter what they did, those meetings in the stationery shop in Tehran of Mr. Fakhri were meant to be. What happened later maybe was not, but meetings with other human beings are footprints that remain in our lives, no matter how superficial we try to be.
I was not probably in the right emotional and personal mood for this book, but no one can mend a broken heart, not even a book about broken hearts.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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