It never ceases to depress me that one of the tenets of classifying a book as a masterpiece of literature is the debasement and humiliation of women. All the major world/patriarchal religions have specific laws that comment on/designate women as sinful and second-class, Islam is no different. The Blind Owl is an Iranian novel and for all its modernist deftness, the bottom line is that a woman is disrespected and promptly butchered to death.
It tells the hallucinogenic tale of an opium addict's descent into madness and despair following the death of his lover (affectionately called ‘the bitch’). This is real De Quincey territory. His 1821 autobiography ‘Confessions of an Opium Eater’ details the pleasures and pains of the drug, where ‘space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night’. Similarly, Hedayat’s unnamed and delirious pen case painter, in a state of disintegration and decomposition lived in a world ‘where time and place lost their validity’. Hedayat’s adroitness lies in his ability to sustain the impact of a set of recurring images that multiply and echo throughout the book: the coughing black horses in front of the butcher shop, the old man's hollow grating laugh and the seminal image he created on the pen case of the squatting old man like an Indian fakir with a turban on his head and before him a dancing girl in a long black dress, holding a morning glory in her hand and between them a stream. A disturbing novel by a melancholic author. Worth the read as an exemplar of hybridized East/West literature.