Sâdeq Hedâyat: Persian Nightmare

Causeur

Right

Factuality

Ownership

"The Iranian Kafka," the press tells us. With these two words, the reader's imagination is titillated: anguish, darkness, confusion, exoticism, orientalism... A good sales technique, perhaps, but a comparison so insufficient to describe the only glaucous and hypnotizing world of Sâdeq Hedayat. The Blind Owl (1936) was one of the first Iranian novels, Persian literature until then dominated by poetry, its ancestral tradition. One book, two novelt…