The Blind Owl

Review by Brian H. Appleton, www.zirzameen.com of: The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat The story is like an opium dream in which the reader drifts along with the writer in and out of awake and dreaming with recurring themes and symbols like an intoxicated mind trying to keep hold of its tenuous grasp on reality. There is the blue morning glory flower, the flower-vase of Rhages, kisses with the bitter taste of the green stub end of the cucumber, the smell of champac perfume, the wine bottle with the cobra venom that he can't get rid of like a boomerang, the singing drunken policemen passing by the street below, the bone handled butcher knife that he can't get rid of like a boomerang, the butcher cutting up sheep carcasses, the coughing horses with dead sheep slung over their backs, these images keep recurring in different circumstances like a floating mirage. His imagery is at times stunningly beautiful like his simple description of a row of dark shadowy trees along a road in the night which look like they are all holding hands so as not to fall down on a slippery slope. The rows of strange and menacing looking houses of geometric shapes like cones and prisms that recur as in a dream sequence; if it were made into a film it would be reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal." The hearse driver and the odds and ends man with his head scarf and hideous laughter "of a quality that make the hairs on one's body stand on end," and the narrator himself seem to at times be different people and at other times they are one and the same. In the end we don't know if the wife has committed adultery or not with one or with many or only with the old odds and ends man or if in fact that was really the narrator and that this is all his imagined paranoia. We sense that his frustration, love and hate for his wife is powerfully real and all consuming regardless of the state of her fidelity and in fact he claims that her neglect is what is causing his slow death. The painting on the top of the pen case is of the dark mysterious woman with staring eyes on the other side of a stream holding a blue morning glory flower while the old man with the scarf wrapped around his head and neck squats on the other side laughing hideously. Where the story started to remind me of Edgar Allen Poe is the first time the theme of the drunken policemen singing as they pass by his window in the street makes him think they are coming to get him so we are given a hint that he has either already committed murder or will, even though the strange silent woman on the pen case has mysteriously appeared sitting on his doorsteps and when he lets her into his house, she goes straight to his bed and lays down and dies. We begin to understand that she and his wife are one and the same person but events which chronologically should precede others seem out of order like the way hallucinations induced by drugs seem to interrupt the brain waves like jumbling the letters of the alphabet out of ord

I can't relate at all to the reviewer who compared reading this book to pulling teeth. It is strange and slightly demented, but these qualities seem only to add to the overall quality. If one were to be in a peculiar state of mind and smoke opium, the result would be something like this. The protagonist is a sick, solitary misanthrope who suffers from what seem to be hallucinations of an old man with a turban with a horrifying laugh (this is repeated over and over again, like some kind of mantra) and a beautiful woman our anti-hero is fixated on. He persistently refers to his wife as "the bitch", but seems to love her dearly despite her infidelity and disdain of him. Hedayat's character is both self loathing and world loathing, preferring to his hypnagogic visions and sickly existence to 'real' life. He no longer makes distinctions between sanity and insanity. He finds a woman's body chopped up (it seems) and does not tell the police. By the end of this novel, really a series of incomprehensible happenings spliced with some bitter comments on humanity, we have come to understand him as a lucid but self divided man losing his mind. This is a must.

"There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker"That is how the translation of D.P. Costello starts. This first line of the book is enough to grab your undivided attention. This opening draws you into a surreal dream world where fiction and fact flow into each other seamlessly, where symbolism and real life events coexist with the shadows of the dreamworld and people of flesh and blood. If you like, this book can be compared to a fugue, a musical discipline where one theme is repeated and transposed/transformed in the other voices. Likewise, certain themes are repeated in a different context, much like a puzzle. If you are looking for something easy to read, skip this book. BUT, if you are looking for a little gem in literature, which will reveal itself to you only after giving it your undivided attention, much like a beautiful woman waiting to be conquered, then buy this book. You will read it, and read it again and again, and experience a secret joy over discovering something this precious, a precious little gem.

i just finished reading the blind owl, and it IS one of the best books i've ever read. the first section is very dark and symbolic and contains a lot of repetitions - a picture within a picture within a picture. i rather wish the book had contained more chapters like this. it was too wonderful for words. the second section detailed the unraveling of the main character in his daily tangible life: his feverish confinement to his room, his growing anxiety, his sense of pervasive and impending doom, which extended beyond himself to the whole of mankind and nature. unfortunately, since my background on iran and ancient persia is somewhat wanting, i think i missed much of the historical symbolism that other readers have mentioned, and had swallowed it mostly as a psychological novel. i'm going to reread it and also look for some kind of a supplement. read this book!

Blind Owl is a great story, but not only that. This book shows the power of Hedayat as a socio-psychologist. I put this book on the top 10 books of 20th century. Hedayat is one of the best of the 20th century writers, relating most closely to Franz Kafka. Read him, if you can!