Reviews

It's hard to put a finger on "The Blind Owl". It's a hallucinatory trip down memory lane, fueled by illness and opium. But it's also a hauntingly beautiful story of lovers and childhood lost, with some heavy symbolism and repetition that will make you dizzy. I often found myself lost in the cycle of what was dream and what was reality and even once I was sure which was which, I couldn't fully tell you how I got there. There are dark desires inside and the gory results of those fantasies, but it's beautifully and sadly written. A shorter novel, and not necessarily a quick read, but it clips along at a good pace. Not the best for night time reading, but excellent to dredge up that academic brain function.

kolymaarasto's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

pronomy_procheta's review against another edition

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dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

ellenaleslie's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

shoba's review against another edition

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4.0

“And if I have decided to write them down now, it is only to introduce myself to my shadow….”

The narrator lives alone in a remote part of a city and writes about his life in order to understand himself better. One day he looks out the window and sees a hunched old man in a shawl and a turban sitting under a cypress tree growing by a stream. He sees a beautiful woman sitting on the other side of the stream, offering the old man a waterlily. The narrator realizes that this was the very scene he paints on every pen case cover he produced for sale. He returns the next day, draws apart the curtain and sees only a wall.

"The unbearable thing is that I felt distant from the people I saw and among whom I lived, but we had a superficial resemblance, a resemblance at the same time distant and near that connected me to them.”

One day, the beautiful woman the narrator saw from his window visits him and upon entering his house, lies down on his bed. Discovering that she was dead, he dismembers her body and puts it in a suitcase.

“Her dead body, her corpse- it was as if this weight had always pressed down on my chest.”

With the help of a gravedigger, he buries the body. Returning home, he smokes the remaining opium and drifts off.

“I woke up in a new world but it all seemed very familiar to me, so familiar that I felt a stronger attachment to it than to my old life- as if it were a reflection of my real existence. It was a different world but seemed closer, more pertinent, as if I had returned to my original environment- I had been reborn into an ancient world but one closer and more natural.”

In this new life, the narrator lives in the ancient city of Rey with his wet nurse and his unfaithful wife.

“Was I obsessed by the beauty of her face or her hatred of me….I only know one thing: I don't know what kind of poison this woman, this slut, this witch had poured into my soul, that I only wanted her….”

The narrator believes his wife was having an affair and was possibly pregnant. He dresses up as his wife’s lover, a peddler, and in the process of seducing her, he kills her.

The narrator wakes to find himself in his room, in the outskirts of a city, and exactly where the novel began.

The narrator’s accounts of his life seem confused and highly unlikely. The sequence of events, the multiple lives, and the repeating of similar descriptions and characters all lead to this conclusion. The old man under the cypress tree, his uncle, the gravedigger, his father-in-law and even possibly the narrator himself all share similar physical characteristics.

“…a hunched old man with an Indian turban on his head and a yellow, tattered cape on his shoulders, and a scarf wrapped around his head and neck….We bore a distant, laughable resemblance to each other, as if my fevered image had been projected on a distorting mirror.”

The circular nature of the storytelling and the repetition of details fells like the retelling of a dream, full of rage, despair and delirium.

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