Book Review: The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza

 

Many books about Iran wrote in diaspora for a non-Iranian audience do usually include a long historical introduction to facts and characters mostly unknown to the public. Mossadegh the prime minister praised for his desire to rule independently of foreign influences is a favorite character of such narratives. Some stories succeed to go beyond this matrix, some not.

The Gardens of Consolation - which I´ve read in the original French as Les Jardins de Consolation - by Parisa Reza, the 2015 recipient of Prix Senghor - is using the long historical evolution of the contemporary Iran - until Mossadegh - to create a unique family portrait. 

It starts with the love story of Sardar and Talla, two illiterate young peasants who are leaving their village going out of their world, near Tehran, where they build up a future based on hard work and a kind of strong connection that only people who only have each other may develop. Their son, Bahram, will be the only graduate ever from the history of the locality, the poster boy of the kind of Iranian the Pahlavi dynasty aimed at building: successful, secular, educated, leaving behind his obscurantist past. But he is also something more: a socialist by belief which would not be able to overcome easily the limitations of his class and genealogy. Not this generation, anyway. 

Bahram will realize his limitations once he is trying to courtship young women with a radically different background from his. Women dancing, drinking champagne, to whose parties the brother of Reza Shah himself takes part. 

Besides a sociological tracing of Iran, Les Jardins de Consolation plays an interesting game of voices. At the beginning, the world is described through the eyes of the simple-minded Talla. Bahram´s growing up is reflected through his own relationships with women, from the blonde Germans he accidentally encounter while trying to sell a rabbit his father caught to the flirting game with sophisticated girls at the university. The secret life of men desires is for me a game I not always figure out. The author´s voice is also present when projecting events into a future that we will never encounter. Not in the pages of the book, anyway.

And there is another element which permeates the story: fear. The fear of moving out or of never moving at all. The fear of the other, of adults, men, religious restrictions, the Shah, of changes. Big fears and small fears, fears that can be fought against or fears that are a lifelong companion.

At certain points, the family dynamics between Talla, Serdar and Bahram is not always balanced and the relationship between the three of them, as a family is not necessarily clear and authentic, but this is my only serious observation about a story which follows a pace of an epic poetry.

Rating: 4 stars