Title : My Name Is Iran A Memoir
Author : Davar Ardalan
Synopsis :
Iran Davar Ardalan, the author of "My Name Is Iran," has spent her life bouncing back and forth between America and Iran, torn between these two poles in her family history, always finding herself an outsider in both countries, always missing one nation's traditions and ideals when living in the other.
As a high school student Ardalan — who dropped her first name, Iran, after anti-Iranian sentiments blossomed in America following the hostage-takings in 1979 — entered a beauty contest in Massachusetts and posed "like Brooke Shields in her famous Calvin Klein ad"; within a few years she had moved to Iran, donned the veil and entered into an arranged marriage with a man she hardly knew. She attended a mass audience with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and chanted his name, lost in the moment "of the Islamic dream"; later, feeling suffocated by her marriage and disenchanted with the direction of the revolution, she moved back to the United States, where she eventually became a producer with National Public Radio.
By turns fascinating and frustrating, Ardalan's memoir is a case study of a book in desperate need of an editor. While compelling portraits of relatives are left curiously truncated and incomplete, the volume is padded with clumsily written, New Agey asides that should have been left on the cutting- room floor.
The reader wants to know more about Ardalan's memories of life under the shah and less about her early jobs in the United States; more about what she witnessed during the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and less about her quest to see "the oneness of humanity." The book lacks the keen, reportorial eye that Azadeh Moaveni demonstrated in her 2005 book "Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran," and it most definitely lacks the lyrical power of Azar Nafisi's remarkable 2003 book "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books."
What keeps the reader reading "My Name Is Iran" is the remarkable trajectory traced by members of three generations of Ardalan's family, as they moved back and forth between the East and West, Iran and America, trying to balance a personal equation of tradition and modernity, religious faith and individualistic freedom.
The story of her maternal grandfather, Abol Ghassem, is in itself a remarkable tale of perseverance and will.
In discussing her childhood in Iran and her visits to America, Ardalan does a better job conveying her own sense of emotional dislocation than giving the reader a palpable appreciation of the two very disparate worlds she straddled.
Genre : Fiction
Pages : 323 (hardcover)
Price : RM20 (not including postage)
Status: Availabe
