Review Summaries

• The novel is valued for layering family tragedy, love, and loss within a fantastical vision of post-revolutionary Iran. Its ghostly point of view and parable-like episodes are presented as giving the book considerable room for interpretation.

• The review recognizes the force with which Persian folklore and dream imagery mythologize revolutionary violence, while also questioning the control of the narration and structure. It treats the book as ambitious, though not always evenly shaped.

Reviews

• An important social issues book.

  The tragic results of nationalism loom large throughout. It must be a profound book to read in the original language. The English version is fascinating and shocking at the same time. Beautifully written.

• freedom hangs by a thread at the whim of zealots

  Our humanity runs deep and long yet freedom to live it to the full hangs by a thread - at the whim of zealots certain of their rightness. A fable about a libertarian Iranian family destroyed progressively by the fanatical Islamic Revolutionaries and who go on to ‘live’ their life journeys imbued with history, mythology and fantasy until eventually they all ‘disappear’ and their collective memory is gone forever. ‘That’s it.’ Narrated by thirteen-year-old Bahar, already dead, as she follows the fortunes of her family in the violent aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution

• amazing book.

  best book ever. if you’re thinking about reading it, just read it don’t hesitate

• Love Letter to a Lost World

  A heartbroken love letter to, and eulogy for, a vanished world. Set in the years following the Iranian Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War, this is the story of all that was lost, as seen through the eyes of the ghost of a thirteen year old girl. Her family flees the turmoil of Tehran for a small, isolated village in the forests of northern Iran, but soon find that even in so removed and idyllic a place they cannot hide from the horrors of the world outside. Steeped in Persian history and folklore, and written in a magic realist style reminiscent of that of Gabriel Garcia Márquez (as opposed to that of say Rushdie or Murakami), The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is a vividly realized reminder of the human and cultural costs fundamentalist zealotry.

• Magical story

  The story is narrated by the ghost of Bahar, a 13 year old girl who loses her life at the beginning of the Islamic revolution begins in 1979. The book looks at how the family is forced to flee to a distant, remote village only because the father played the tar and read books without censorship, and how they fall apart because of the eight year long religious war that destroyed the youth of the country. The author uses Iranian folklore peppered with myths, jinns and ghosts to speak about how the world shifted in Iran during those times. There is a reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of solitude where soldiers are confused by the book but don't burn it because they don't think it's political in nature. This is also a reference to magic realism which is the genre of this book itself. The best way to describe this book is that it's quiet. It's melancholic, magical and even heartbreaking but mostly it's quiet. In its own form of silence it tells a tale that no one should forget - erasing culture and literature and imagining you are liberating people has to be the worst form of persecution. A pain that gets embedded into generations. I need to specifically mention how she speaks about how Ayatollah Khomeini died alone in his room of mirrors like every dictator. The book is banned in Iran although I am sure one could find an underground copy. The book was originally written in Farsi and it's translated version was Long Listed for the International Booker Prize in 2020.

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