Fatah makes his living as a doctor who sews back young women’s hymens before they marry. This happens in Teheran, after the Islamic revolution. Even though Fatah hides things in his past that cast dark shadows over his own morality, he allows himself to scold the girls who come into his clinic, and to treat them wdisrespectfully. They are scared and hurting, but he doesn’t care. Till one day, a girl comes into his clinic who has very special eyes, which remind Fatah of his teen love to a beautiful singer. He becomes obsessed with the girl, even though he knows she is about to marry someone else. Fatah and other people in this novel make you sick with their corrupted ways. They see themselves as above the law, and are hypocritical – they allow themselves what they take from others. They stand for a rich, beautiful old culture which has taken a wrong turn. This is a nation with a great history, but the revolution has brought out of it all that is worst in mankind – pure evil, cruelty, lack of empathy, corruption, fanaticism and madness. Facing these characters are all of their innocent victims – those who tried to keep their humanity and values in face of the horrors all around them; those who wanted a quiet and normal life, but were crushed under the revolution’s wheels. They had to be destroyed so as not to remind others of what they had lost, of what they could have been.
An excellent and disturbing novel that is an important warning sign.