"Will anyone ever penetrate the secret of this disease which transcends ordinary experience, this reverberation of the shadow of the mind, which manifests itself in a state of coma like that between death and resurrection, when one is neither asleep nor awake?"

"It seemed to me that until now I had not known myself and that the world as I had conceived it hitherto had lost all significance and validity and had been replaced by the darkness of night. For I had not been taught to gaze at and to love the night."

"Am I a being separate and apart from the rest of creation? I do not know. But when I looked into the mirror a moment ago I did not recognize myself. No, the old 'I' has died and rotted away, but no barrier, no gulf, exists between it and the new one."

"What comforted me was the prospect of oblivion after death. The thought of an afterlife frightened and fatigued me. I had never been able to adapt myself to the world in which I was now living. Of what use would another world be to me?"

"I thought to myself, 'If it is true that everyone has his own star in the sky mine must be remote, dark and meaningless. Perhaps I have never had a star at all.'"

'Dhalgren' was a lengthy mindfuck of a novel, narrated by the slow-paced Kid; this book is much shorter, with a frenetic narrator who is half-living in a fever dream, but it's every bit as much of a mindfuck as Delaney's work was.

The foreword should definitely be read before the rest of the story, as it explains the translator's motivation to re-translate the work, as well as the significance of the 'bruised morning glory' that appears throughout this book (in general, images are frequently repeated here; I liked the moments where an image seems unusual and unnecessary and then comes back to haunt). It's also worth reading the discussion of 'domestication' vs 'foreignization'. I personally like when phrases are translated as close to the original as is possible without hindering readability, and there's a number of Iranian items whose names are not 'domesticated' at all. (Actually, it's fun to see words that exist in this text which have alternate, but similar, definitions in Hindi.)

The good news is that there are plenty of footnotes; the bad news is that, at least for the Kindle edition, everything is at the end of the text and the numbering is completely fucked, so you'll have to pay at least a little attention to figure out which #1 you should be looking at.

I know that I have an interpretation of what happened in this book—I'd be interested to discuss it with others. Either way, I'm sure that each reread of this text would reveal something new and significant.

I don't know what to say other than you should read this

“In life there are wounds that like termites, slowly bore into and eat away at the isolated soul.” So begins this dark psychological novella, a defining work of modern Persian literature originally published in 1936 and largely suppressed in Iran to this day. An alienated narrator who spends his days painting pen-case covers and consuming wine and opium recounts a series of fevered visions mingling images of death and desire that are both palpable and dreamlike: the intimacy of a slaughtered lamb, the cold objectivity of a lover’s dismembered corpse. Obsessive nesting stories concerning the speaker’s cousin and “slut wife,” their mutual wet nurse, and various decrepit men termed “the vulgar” are open to interpretation, but corroborate in their galling physicality a devout wish for that “sleep of oblivion” apparently shared by Hedayet himself, whose final words were the brief suicide note, “I left and broke your heart. That is all.” Ranking alongside the masterworks of Poe, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Pessoa, this indelible existential nightmare is rendered with startling clarity through Sassan Tabatabai’s assured new translation, in an accessible edition certain to expand Hedayat’s renown, and notoriety.

Hmm, not sure what I just read. The first part was 5/5 but the second part got so monologue-y that I got kinda lost/bored. I know the confusion is partially intentional, the guy is cracked out on opium for gods sake, but I’m gonna have to think about this one some more to see what I can get from it.

This is a difficult book to rate and review, especially for a reader like myself who is not acquainted enough with the historical and cultural context of the work and author or Persian literature in general to have much of an opinion short of my personal experience of reading it. As a work of literature, it's very fascinating--regarded as the first work of modern Persian literature, the novella uses elements from non-Persian literature, like gothic horror, modernist surrealism and existentialism, to explore the cultural and politics shift from pre-Islamic to Islamic Iran, a shift that was alienating for intellectuals like Hedayat himself. It's heady stuff, the kind of literary stuff I like a lot. I just wish I understood it better.

For many contemporary readers with little to no background knowledge about Hedayat or Iran of his day, I suspect this work might not be a very accessible. Even though I did some research on the novella, including reading the introduction to this translation, as well as some reading on Hedayat and Iran during his time, I felt there were many places in the novella that I sensed Hedayat had something very much in mind with his symbolism, surrealism and allusions, but due to my ignorance, I simply had no clue. I will have to be content with a general idea of what Hadayat was attempting with this novella while I leave with many questions about Hedayat's writing style, literary choices and other elements with the text that will have to go unanswered, as I'm not able to devote my life to becoming a modern Persian lit expert. Nonetheless I feel I got enough out of this to say it's a very intriguing work, but perhaps one that would sadly have a very limited appeal for contemporary Western readers.

Садек Хедајат је ово писао обузет депресијом, извесно под утицајем неких психоактивних супстанци. Прилично мрачно, надреално и чудно.

"Wasn't I myself the result of many succeeding generations, and weren't their hereditary sufferings inherent in me? Wasn't the past in myself?" / "I had the dreadful sensation that I was not really alive or wholly dead. I was a living corpse, unrelated to the world of living people and at the same time deprived of the oblivion and peace of death."

My favourite opium-addicted lunatic d!ckhead driven mad by isolation living a half-life, half self annihilation.

A 3 that'll likely become a 4 once I've discussed it and gone through the introduction, bloody hell. It does out Poe Poe, and even the marginally more realistic second half is still clouded in opium hallucinations and madness.