Review: The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali

A story about the relationship between a girl and her brilliant friend that becomes challenged by differences in class and opportunities, set against a vibrant backdrop of post-War political strife — and it isn’t My Brilliant Friend. Trading Naples for Iran, The Lion Women of Tehran follows Ellie’s friendship with the brilliant Homa through the overthrow of Mossadegh and then the Shah, through school, marriage and motherhood.

The comparison with Elena Ferrante’s masterpiece unfortunately renders this novel’s flaws more apparent. Ferrante’s Lila and Lenu are complex women; although both are passionate and smart, they each make very human, very understandable, but ultimately regrettable decisions. Their friendship is sometimes close and sometimes strained, and these moments of separation and reconnection are richly written and resonant. 

In contrast, Marjan Kamali’s Homa is too unwaveringly self-confident, wise, ambitious, and forgiving. It is only while working through the trauma of being raped and impregnated in prison that her drive to fix her country temporarily dampens (although these chapters are some of the book’s best writing). Similarly, the conflict between Ellie and Homa is never permitted to venture into the same depths of betrayal, despite the author setting up dramatic stakes. When Homa transfers into Ellie’s high school after several years of separation, Ellie snubs her out of fear of her association with a low class girl harming her social status. But Homa is so self-assured and likable that she misses the slight, wins over all the other girls, and resumes her close friendship with Ellie. At a party, Ellie uncharacteristically jealously accuses Homa of flirting with her boyfriend, and Homa responds maturely and magnanimously. In a moment of unbelievable naivete, Ellie informs a spy about Homa’s communist activities, leading to Homa’s arrest, and eventual rape. When Ellie finally confesses to her role in Homa’s misfortune, Homa forgives her like it was nothing. Homa does cut off their friendship for over a decade, but it is later revealed that she does so purely out of concern for Ellie’s safety. In each of these conflicts, Homa is simply too noble, and Ellie is too undeserving of Homa’s unending patience and love.

So the emotional journeys fall flat and the character’s actions sometimes feel unnatural, but perhaps character development is the wrong yardstick for this work. My Brilliant Friend aims to understand how one’s circumstances and relationships shape a person, but I believe Kamali’s interests lie elsewhere. In her author’s note at the end of my edition, she highlights the theme of Iranian women’s issues that courses throughout her novels, inspired in part by the independent and opinionated Iranian women in her family. She wrote this book during the 2022 women’s protests in response to security forces killing Mahsa Jina Amini for improper hijab, an event featured in the novel. Kamali regularly advocates for women’s liberations through her characters, such as in this speech of Homa’s:

“The dutiful Persian wife is what you became! Look, Ellie, there’s nothing wrong with that. In my women’s organization and in our activism, one thing we’re trying to uphold is that feminism comes in many shapes. We should not shame women who choose to take care of home and family. As long as it’s the woman’s choice. I don’t mean to imply that your job now, or even if you chose in the past or later choose to stay home, is in any way antifeminist. Because all of it has a place in true feminism. A woman has a right to live a life of intense career ambition or one of more mellow ambition or what have you. As I say, whatever she chooses.”

So maybe the yardstick to consider is the author’s development of political questions.

However, here, too, I find the author falls short. Her feminism is a feminism that is unthreatening and unchallenging to the sensibilities of the West, a feminism that was already well-trodded 25 years ago and mainstream a decade ago. It is the feminism that embraces housewives and girlbosses, the feminism that crafted pink hats and marched on Washington in reaction to Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss, the feminism that reaches for elections and the freedoms of speech and association as its most valued political tools. The novel’s publisher is Simon & Schuster, one of the largest publishers in the US; its target reader is American. But who is the reader that is picking up a book about a friendship between two women who would find something to challenge their political views in this narrative?

Moreover, the author’s argument for this limp strain of feminism misses the opportunity to introduce the reader to truly Iranian perspectives on women’s liberation. Homa is a member of the communist party before leaving it to ultimately become part of the women’s movement. However, her impassioned rants — even those from her communist days — emphasize women’s liberation but with little Marxist influence. How did years spent in the Iranian communist movement shape Homa’s views on women’s freedom? Apparently not at all; capitalism’s role in oppressing women and powering imperialism goes unmentioned. Homa’s feminism is the sort that would be welcome in the pages of American news outlets with even the most hawkish stance on Iran (“My focus is not communism. It’s not capitalism. What I care about, Ellie, more than anything is democracy. And women’s rights,” Homa informs us).

While Homa leads marches, Kamali uses Ellie to show us a different tactic for changing the world. At Homa’s encouragement, Ellie opens an Iranian restaurant to introduce New Yorkers to the richness of Persian cuisine.

“And maybe, just maybe, you’ll open your own restaurant here. How amazing would that be? A café. Show these people our culture. Show them our food. Let them taste our dishes. Let them know who we are. What do you say?”

Food is a wonderful way to learn about a culture. But does the American people’s enjoyment of a regional cuisine advance the independence and interests of its people?

Whether an effective strategy or not, this is the yardstick by which Kamali most succeeds. The food and markets of Tehran come alive in her writing. Dishes are lusciously described, and cooking is presented as a real art form, one that can be perfected by women despite severe social restrictions, and one that unites people. In a media environment that paints Iran as a terrifying and alien country, The Lion Women of Tehran introduces the reader to the distinctive beauty of Iranian culture, albeit a version of it most palatable to the average American reader.

Review: Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Arkady Martine is a great writer — I loved A Memory Called Empire — but this wasn't the novella for me. As always, her prose is beautiful, a real delight to read. She's smart, and playful in the way she weaves art and social critique into her stories. The reflections on how architecture relates to society and shapes a person's perspective of their environment were some of my favourite passages in this book.

The vibe of the novella is also fun — a haunted house version of Annihilation. While Vandermeer's book also featured a woman venturing forward into an alien and hostile world, the novel was propelled by the emotional interiority of the main character (why did she choose to go on that mission?). In contrast, Martine's protagonists are stock police drama characters, developed shallowly. Her novella's momentum is instead carried by the central mystery. And I just didn't find it a sufficiently captivating question. Maybe it's because some of what makes this mystery mysterious is the specific rules of Martine's sci-fi world, and at just 115 pages, Martine just doesn't give herself enough space to flesh out a world in which a dead body in an AI house becomes a real, engrossing mystery. Or maybe it is that I just don't care for police procedurals, no matter how clever the writer.

Review: Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib

This is a fun little collection of "braided" essays, weaving together history, social commentary, and the author’s own travel experiences. The author is a Muslim Indian woman who immigrated to the United States. She brings a fresh perspective to the discourse around travel, which, due to its costs and visa privileges, tends to be the domain of the white, wealthy denizens of just a select few countries.

Based only on the title, I probably would not have picked up this book: "an irreverent history" sounds like the sort of subtitle that would belong on some reddit-humoured drek. Instead, by "irreverent," I have to imagine the editor has in mind the author’s questioning of the West’s self-mythologizing, such as her critique of Marco Polo:

But if we set aside the question of whether or not Marco Polo was the first European to reach China, there is a more interesting question: Why is it an achievement to be the first European to reach China? Who is that an achievement for? We rarely hear about the first Asian to reach Europe or the first African to reach the Americas. But the first European to reach China and the first European to reach India by sea and the first European to reach the Americas? Their names are household names, not because this is a major achievement, but because of the European investment in the idea of the first European to reach these “other” places.

Or her analysis of "authenticity":

Pretty much every guidebook I have read for any Third World country will describe it as a tapestry of cultures or a colorful mix of ancient and modern. If more than half the world is a mix of ancient and modern, perhaps then we should accept that this particular hybridity is the norm, while the vapid industrial modernity of a Western suburb is the exception. If this constant and complex mixing of cultures is the real world, then why do guidebooks still lead us on wild-goose chases for the “authentic”? No one is as anxious about authenticity as a white tourist who rightly suspects that the world has been watered down for their benefit. But authenticity is a moving target; it has a talent for confounding the search. Perhaps the solution then is to understand and embrace the multiple hybrid shapes and forms authenticities can take within the limitations of the tourism project.

It is a critique that I find timely and essential in such an unequal world, where travel seems increasingly to become the point of life and the mode of self-actualization for the upper middle class of the West. 

The author interprets "travel" broadly, with each chapter standing alone as an essay on a particular angle. She covers topics ranging from travel guides, to visa privilege, to religious pilgrimage, to just riding public transit within one’s own city. She includes fascinating and relevant parts of history and literature in her accounts, however the balance leans strongly personal. Those readers uninterested in memoir and introspection would be advised to find a different book.

The author left me with one nagging question. As she points out, travel is something enjoyed primarily by a privileged few, and has destructive effects on the environment and on the culture and economies of touristy areas, and yet on the other hand, travel also provides the opportunity to broaden one’s understanding of the world and the richness of human culture and society. For the lucky traveller who is able to partake in expanding her horizons through travel, what is she to do but wring her hands over the negative externalities. Here, the author has not much to say, though like me, I imagine she also dreams of a world in which everyone can travel, at least occasionally.

Review: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

I went in fully prepared to find this book over-hyped. Since its release, I have seen its minimalist avian cover everywhere one could possibly encounter something literary, but never a review or a critique or a reflection that made me understand why its contents deserve such a prized place. (Contrast this with, say, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation, which has been similarly plastered about and for which I regularly stumble upon interesting reflections about where she succeeds or fails in capturing Homer’s age-old story, or how it captured someone’s fancy.) Quite to my surprise, I loved it.

I can see immediately why this epistolary novel captured the literary crowd: it is a very literary book. In their correspondence with each other, the characters reference books and authors constantly. The main character, Sybil, and her best friend end their letters to each other with “What are you reading?” The books that characters select for each other or for themselves relate to the familiar reader something about their inner lives and preoccupations, and this intertextuality lends itself to a rich reading experience. For example, Sybil maintains a correspondence with Joan Didion. Having recently read The Year of Magical Thinking, I can imagine why she first reached out in the years following the death of her son.

But there is more to the book than just the satisfaction of “getting the references.” The central character is a complex but compelling woman with a strong sense of herself, but who has locked up her heart in the wake of her child’s death and as a defense mechanism as an early pioneering working woman in a male-dominated field. Her past is revealed to us slowly, satisfyingly. For example, her eloquent rage at the levity with which a newspaper covered a boy’s accidental death becomes more understandable once we learn of her own experiences. Her correspondence first introduces us into a number of disparate plotlines, which we slowly discover are really different versions of similar struggles: family separation and re-unification; forging familial relationships outside of one’s bloodline; and fitting into the world awkwardly, whether because of one’s gender, orientation, immigration status, or neurodivergence. The weaving together of these themes from many different angles produces an emotionally resonant work.

The author’s writing was beautiful, moving; I highlighted many passages. Here are a few:

I am finding I have nowhere to put all of [these thoughts]. I’m sorry, but do you know what I mean? It’s like I’ve come home from the grocery store overburdened with bags, but the cupboards, the refrigerator, the pantry, the countertop are all already full.

I was afraid to have a girl because what if I couldn’t understand you? I’d never found a way to fit into the world, not really, and what if I didn’t know how to be a mother to you? I was afraid and that’s the whole thing. I was afraid all the time of losing something or ruining something, and then I did.

You and I have enjoyed an honest, confrontational friendship for going on sixty years.

Answer every question they’ve asked, and ask your own, and you will have created a never-ending circuit of curiosity and learning.

My letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life, where I was only practicing law for thirty years or so. The clerkship was my job, the letters amount to who I am.

Review: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

What to say about Roberto Bolaño's wild, wild, 1100-page journey of a novel? Did I find the plot gripping, its unending pages flying by? No. But did I find the characters emotionally resonant, such that aspects of the human experience were revealed or made clear to me? Also no. But did I delight in the prose, marveling at the ingenuity of the mind to have fashioned words together in such an evocative way? Once more, no.

But I did really enjoy this book for the unique way it developed its themes. The book is structured as five very different (almost) standalone novels. No single story makes a strong statement about a particular topic, but by touching on a given idea from a variety of angles, the theme comes into focus.

One such example is the idea of how easy it is to escape the horrors of the world and remain in one’s comfortable intellectual community. The first of the five volumes revolves around a tight-knit community of scholars who have devoted their lives to the study and translation of the novels by a mysterious German writer, Archimboldi. As these characters unravel their love triangles and academic tensions, we hear the briefest murmurings of some tragic story in a small town in Mexico. In a few scenes, there are moments of shocking racism and violence, but ultimately these conflicts barely matter. Questions of the heart and intellectual musings occupy the characters. In the second volume, we see more of the unrest and violence in Latin America, and we are introduced to a troubled, drifting woman, but through the eyes of a busy academic. Matters of violence and sexism and racism affect him insofar as they affect the people he loves. When it comes to broad issues affecting humanity, Professor Amalfatino’s more memorable reflections revolve around literature and intellectual culture. The third volume brings us closer still: through the eyes of a reporter, we learn about the startlingly frequent and brutal murders of women in the town of Santa Teresa. But Oscar Fate’s beat is African American affairs and his editor won’t allow him to expense an investigation into issues that affect Latinas. Three different explorations of how sites of knowledge production avoid systemic issues of violence and sexism. The fourth volume hits us over the head with the events in Santa Teresa, striking a format somewhere between a police blotter and a novel. The discovery of each woman’s body is described in detail, as is the largely fruitless investigation into their murder. The author shows us how poverty, misogyny, and American imperialism contribute to these deaths, and hinder their investigation. “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them,” a character reflects.

Most of these mysteries go unsolved; the author seems to be cautioning us that mysteries in life do not typically have a climactic, satisfying conclusion. Despite Volume 4 resembling a police intrigue more than any other genre, we never find out who murdered all the women in Santa Teresa. Most likely it was many killers. Many killers, and broader socioeconomic problems. Volume 1 sets up the mystery of who Archimboldi really is, but ends without providing any answers — neither to the reader, nor to the scholars desperate to meet him. In Volume 5, the reader learns just about all there is to know about the life of Archimboldi. He is ultimately not a particularly interesting man (notwithstanding his quiet assassination of a bureaucratic Nazi). Nor is he a particularly compelling character, remaining always a little emotionally distant from the reader. Would the scholars that devoted their lives to dissecting his every written word find satisfaction in finally getting to meet him? 

It is a pessimistic novel. Or perhaps that diagnosis goes too far? The author shows us that real peace and happiness can be found in love. But the novel is broadly sorrowful about the state of society and we see few glints of hope for transcending it. Vulgarity and violence (particularly against women) — permeate the novel: the pummeling of the taxi driver in the first volume; the woman pushed into the ravine to her death by her own husband in the fifth volume; the spectator sport of fighting that drives the plot of the third volume; the systematic slaughter of Jews recounted by the unrepentant bureaucrat in Volume 5; and of course the litany of murders of the fourth volume. The refrain "she had been anally and vaginally raped" is repeated so often that I found myself anticipating the blow of hearing it every time another body is found. 

It is a very self-conscious and self-referential work. Bolaño’s characters discuss literature and art, and much of the commentary applies to the novel they appear in ("The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere."). Bolaño wrote this novel seeing his own death approaching on the horizon, and there are moments where he appears to reflect on his own place in the literary canon:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

What is that "something that terrifies us all" that Bolaño saw himself as struggling with, in this imperfect, torrential work? It’s a question the book rewards with many answers. Contemplating what these might be, long after you’ve put down the book, is what makes this novel enjoyable.

Review: Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

This is a lively and approachable essay collection for introducing the reader to anti-capitalist discourse in modern India. The opening essay, which lends the work its title, is an evergreen socioeconomic analysis of India: how has capitalist production dispossessed the workers? How do Western imperialism and homegrown monopolies shape the laws and relations of production? How do NGOs support this exploitation, despite their lofty rhetoric? And how does gendered and caste exploitation figure into all of this? It's a great read, and I recommend it as a stand-alone piece.

The remaining essays are much shorter, and focus on hot issues of the 2010s: the increasing militarized policing of Kashmir, the Jan Lokpal Bill, and the clandestine capital punishment of Mohammad Afzal, for example. I was unfamiliar with these events, and the discourse around them, and took the opportunity to learn more about India's recent history. Roy seems to cut through the murkiness around these social issues with clarity, highlighting power relationships and financial ties between capitalist firms and the media companies that misleadingly report on these events, and the role of US imperialism and the military industrial complex in taking advantage of these fracture points. Given the temporal and geographical distance between me and this subject matter, however, these are less relevant to my context, and their anthologization is not more than the sum of the parts.

Review: The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism by Torkil Lauesen

Okay, so you’ve decided you want the end of capitalism. To figure out how to get there, you need to know the history of attempts to supersede it. There has been several centuries of such history, and much of it has been written by the victors — the capitalists, not the socialists. Torkil Lauesen’s 2024 book serves as an introduction to this history, and I would recommend it for a curious reader interested in learning more about socialism.

The overarching argument is that the transition towards socialism has been and will be a long process, involving changes in the way economies produce goods, in how social systems and cultural institutions are structured, and in how nations interact. The majority of the book is comprised of a roughly chronological narrative of socialist projects, beginning with the 1848 revolutions and ending with Xi Jinping’s reforms in China. These past efforts have shown us the need for state structures and for increased technological development, against utopian socialist visions for stateless and pre-industrial forms of socialism. At the same time, Lauesen argues, rigid and technocratic state structures and overemphasis on economic development have also brought economic collapse, misadministration of justice, climate devastation, worker exploitation and other ills of capitalist production.

Lauesen untangles history with nuance, carefully considering competing economic interests and capabilities. He emphasizes throughout the changing understanding of internationalism, sovereignty, development of the forces of economic production, and the role of the state in constructing socialism. Lauesen’s analysis leads him to support China, which he sees as now reining in the capitalist excesses of its transition to modern economic production towards the construction of socialism, and acting as a bulwark against western (capitalist) imperialism so that other socialist projects could hope to do the same. 

These historical sections are book-ended by a brief introduction on his method (dialectical materialism) and concluding remarks on how the contradictions of imperialism and capitalism are unfolding in different regions around the world and on what is to be done to bring about socialism. The Introduction I found compelling. The concluding sections I found a bit overly long and yet also too superficial to provide enough to sink one’s teeth into. Still, I appreciate the author’s having placed stakes in the ground for what he predicts might happen, since it allows future readers to better evaluate the accuracy of his assessment.

While I agree, for the most part, with Lauesen’s main points (as outlined above), I found much to quibble with, and would recommend against using this book as a historical reference. This was particularly true of eras of history which I have studied more closely, which leads me to believe that there are many other historical beats that were not quite correctly portrayed. Some quibbles are mostly inconsequential: for example, Lauesen states that “Marx’s critique did not affect the [Gotha Programme]” while Lars Lih compellingly argues that important parts of the programme were “completely rewritten” in response. Some quibbles are a matter of polemics and interpretation: Lauesen, in his typical anti-Stalin bent, makes much of Lenin’s dying thoughts on succession, when, in my opinion, socialist states should use more democratic means of selecting their next leaders.

Several of my concerns have more historical import. Lauesen presents the Stalinist purges as very top down, and led by Stalin himself, minimizing the role played by workers and party members throughout the state. Similarly, the collapse of the Soviet Union is interpreted as a top-down betrayal, more akin to Zubov’s bourgeois nationalist assessment than Kenney and Keeran’s Marxist analysis of economic conditions and philosophical battles. While Lauesen is particularly uncharitable to the post-Lenin USSR, I believe he goes far too easy on the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which he presents as “a much-needed showdown with bureaucracy, expert mentality, and hierarchy.” There are also some notable absences, such as the DPRK — which presents an important example of a nation that, unlike China or Vietnam, has chosen isolation rather than integration with the capitalist system.

Still, this book organizes a long and complex history, and presents it approachably. Its gaps and missteps can be addressed with other readings, or through critical discussion in a reading circle.