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WORK TITLE: The Gardens of Consolation
WORK NOTES: trans by Adriana Hunter
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1965
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: Iranian
https://www.europaeditions.com/author/196/parisa-reza * https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2016/12/22/the-gardens-consolation-are-lush-tale/H1nxWRyzIy55A1hh7jHbUP/story.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1965, in Tehran, Iran.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Prix Senghor, 2015, for The Gardens of Consolation.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Author Parisa Reza was born in Iran and resides in France. The Gardens of Consolation serves as Reza’s literary debut and earned the Prix Senghor award for the year 2015.
The Gardens of Consolation takes place in Reza’s home country of Iran and focuses on the various social and political changes that occurred over the past couple of decades. These events are witnessed through the eyes of one family. The novel starts off with founders Sardar and Talla, who have just gotten married and are resettling in Tehran. The two were raised in the country, so life in the sprawling city of Tehran jumbles their emotions into a knot of excitement and confusion. Together they must figure out how to navigate their new lives, especially as they begin their lives together and their country begins to change all around them.
The Gardens of Consolation becomes a generational work, moving on from following Sardar and Talla to their eldest child, Bahram. Born and raised in Shemiran, after his parents’ second relocation, Bahram is allowed the chance to break away from country life when he begins going to school. Academics prove to be his primary talent, and Bahram eventually advances toward university, becoming the first in his family and his local area to do so. He winds up being lured into politics. Meanwhile, Sardar and Talla continue with their daily lives, the political changes rising around them simply falling into the background within their own points of view. The lives of parents and son come to form a distinct contrast, through which Reza examines the effects of Iran’s political history upon the country and its people.
One Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that Reza “is uncommonly generous to her characters, and Talla is a formidable, hard-to-forget heroine.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked: “This compelling book raises important questions about indulgence, gender, community, and the impact of politics on everyday life.” Carmela Ciuraru, a reviewer in the New York Times, called The Gardens of Consolation an “exquisite, deceptively quiet novel.” World Literature Today writer Poupeh Missaghi commented that “you are in for a beautiful tour de force of a novel.” Anne Clinard Barnhill, a contributor to the Historical Novel Society website, stated: “The Gardens of Consolation is a lovely book filled with both heartbreak and hope.” On the Christian Science Monitor website, Anna Mundow called the book a “luminous first novel.” She also wrote: “So rooted, indeed, is Parisa Reza’s writing in the fertile soil of Iran that “The Gardens of Consolation” seems to contain an entire nation.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of The Gardens of Consolation.
New York Times, December 26, 2016, Carmela Ciuraru, review of The Gardens of Consolation, p. C5(L).
Publishers Weekly, October 3, 2016, review of The Gardens of Consolation, p. 96.
ONLINE
Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/ (February 13, 2017), Anna Mundow, review of The Gardens of Consolation.
Historical Novel Society Website, https://historicalnovelsociety.org/ (February 1, 2017), Anne Clinard Barnhill, review of The Gardens of Consolation.
World Literature Today, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/ (March 1, 2017), Poupeh Missaghi, review of The Gardens of Consolation.
Parisa Reza was born in Tehran in 1965 to a family of intellectuals and artists, and moved to France at the age of seventeen. She was awarded the Prix Senghor 2015 for her first novel, The Gardens of Consolation.
The Gardens of Consolation
263.40 (Oct. 3, 2016): p96.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* The Gardens of Consolation
Parisa Reza, trans. from the French by Adriana Hunter. Europa (PRH, dist.), $16 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-60945-350-3
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Iran's early 20th-century political upheavals drive this absorbing debut novel about a working-class couple and their gifted, socially ambitious son. The novel, by Iranian author Reza, opens in the early 1920s, with young newlyweds Talla and Sardar Amir traveling from their native Qamsar to the suburbs of Tehran, where Sardar has established himself as a shepherd. For the couple, who are illiterate and unworldly, the migration proves emboldening but also disorienting. Sardar is gripped by the "contained suffering that went by the name of exile," and Talla bristles at unfamiliar class hierarchies and fluctuating customs regarding chadors. They later move to Shemiran, where they raise a son, Bahram, who begins "breaking with [the] continuity" of his parents' provincialism. Under a mandate from Reza Shah, Bahram begins attending school at six and quickly finds himself to be an avid pupil. After receiving his village's first high school diploma, Bahram goes on to attend the prestigious Tehran University, where he becomes involved in the National Front, a nationalist party. Reza, by weaving intimate domestic details with explications of Iran's shifting fortunes (the nationalization of the country's oil and the overthrow of Mosaddegh feature prominently here), succeeds in imbuing the Amirs' story with stirring sociopolitical importance. She is uncommonly generous to her characters, and Talla is a formidable, hard-to-forget heroine. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Gardens of Consolation." Publishers Weekly, 3 Oct. 2016, p. 96. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466166563&it=r&asid=0bc69a6acc53f2e3098df7bb37763141. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466166563
Parisa Reza, Adriana Hunter: THE GARDENS OF CONSOLATION
(Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Parisa Reza, Adriana Hunter THE GARDENS OF CONSOLATION Europa Editions (Adult Fiction) 16.00 ISBN: 978-1-60945-350-3
Love, lust, and politics can sometimes exist harmoniously. They can also clash.In the early 1920s, when Talla was 9 years old and living in Ghamsar, Iran, she married Sardar, a slightly older boy from the same remote village. Although it was an arranged marriage, in keeping with tradition, the two had eyed one another and approved the match. And although the union was not consummated until three years laterSardar had big dreams and opted to travel to the nations capital and establish himself before settling into domesticityby the time they moved to a Tehran suburb as husband and wife, it was clear to everyone that they were in love. There was heartbreak, too, as they lost one child and then another. Finally, in 1933, son Bahram was born. Not surprisingly, he became the apple of his parents eyes and was heavily indulged. Unlike his illiterate mother and father, Bahram attended school and excelled, eventually winning a scholarship to university. He also became a womanizer, and the novel charts the factors that led him there. The book is set against a constantly changing political milieu, and readers are made privy to the fall of the Qajar dynasty and the power grab of Reza Khan, who emerged as shah. Bahrams support of socialist Mohammad Mosaddegh and Khalil Maleki, men who eschewed alliances with both Russia and the West, is posited in opposition to the ideas of Sardar and Talla, peasants unconcerned with politics. As they see it, life is unchanging; regardless of who is in power, they will toil and, later, revel in simple pleasures. The contrast is riveting. Winner of 2015s Prix Senghor for a debut novel by a Francophone writer, this compelling book raises important questions about indulgence, gender, community, and the impact of politics on everyday life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Parisa Reza, Adriana Hunter: THE GARDENS OF CONSOLATION." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181871&it=r&asid=7d87842fde4873b5f50bb088490b480f. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181871
Review: 'Small Admissions,' 'Freebird' and More
Carmela Ciuraru
(Dec. 26, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC5(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
The Gardens Of Consolation
By Parisa Reza, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. 260 pages. Europa Editions. $16.
This exquisite, deceptively quiet novel opens with a 12-year-old Iranian girl and her donkey, trekking down a desolate desert road. The girl, Talla, is already married; her shepherd husband, Sardar, walks beside her. She finds comfort in her belief that ''no one but God and her husband would have authority over her.'' The year is 1920. Talla, who like her husband is illiterate, has never left her home village and has no idea that World War I has ended, yet ''her reclusive life felt enormous to her.'' Talla settles with Sardar outside of Tehran and learns by way of gossiping locals about her country's chaotic politics, including the transformative rise of Reza Khan. When Khan becomes the king, Reza Shah, he begins ''flouting Iranian tradition, and the changes would prove devastating.'' Some of the novel's passages seem uncannily relevant to the current divide over immigration in America -- with mention of ''people who spoke languages no one understood, who came from everywhere and nowhere. New arrivals were always viewed with suspicion.'' The novel traces the couple's lives over decades, as they struggle to start a family and find stability amid political tumult.
Amid the cacophony of voices competing for dominance (and oil) in their country, Talla's politically engaged son, Bahram -- handsome, educated, a star athlete -- navigates dangerous paths of activism and resistance ''with a strange mix of narcissism and patriotism.'' Slowly, the narrative evolves from an intimate chronicle of Talla and Sardar's provincial lives into a sweeping tour through early-20th-century Iran.
Small Admissions
By Amy Poeppel. 358 pages. Aria Books. $26.
This debut novel might be described as ''The Devil Wears Prada'' meets ''Primates of Park Avenue.'' A behind-the-scenes glimpse into the daunting admissions process at an elite Manhattan private school, ''Small Admissions'' offers a tantalizing if shallow premise. Kate Pearson, 25, lands a job at the fictional Hudson Day School after a comically terrible interview. She dislikes children, curses with abandon and is inconsolable after a breakup with her French boyfriend. Alongside subplots involving Kate's controlling sister, Angela, and two college friends, the story follows Kate's work tribulations and renewed attempts at dating. Although Ms. Poeppel once worked in private school admissions, she delivers few startling insights. The rich parents are as entitled and demanding as you might expect. They try to bribe their way into a top-choice school or threaten litigation; they're a bit crazy and trapped in unhappy marriages; they panic over their children's test scores and essays. ''Getting into private school in Manhattan is like getting into Harvard,'' one desperate woman says, reminding her husband, ''We have to appear stable.'' The cliches extend to a promising Latina applicant, the violin-playing and ''unusually empathetic'' Claudia Gutierrez, whose mother works two jobs and whose father died of cancer. Nuance is largely absent as the novel goes for frothy fun and hits predictably heartwarming notes. Take it for what it is; you'll be entertained.
Freebird
By Jon Raymond. 322 pages. Graywolf Press. $26.
The Lynyrd Skynyrd classic for which this uneven novel is named figures into the final scene -- aptly, a road trip. The song provides liberation, though not for the character most in need of release: Anne Singer, a 45-year-old single mother in Los Angeles, frustrated by her dead-end job in a municipal sustainability office. Suffering from burnout and ''generalized hate,'' she's vulnerable to the brash businessman who approaches her with a convoluted plan to monetize the city's wastewater supply. She is also coping with care for her octogenarian, Holocaust-survivor father, and a strained relationship with her feckless teenage son. Her brother, Ben, an ex-Navy SEAL, returns home with PTSD and a murder plot directed at a former employer. The novel toggles discordantly between dysfunctional family drama and crime thriller. Despite hints of weighty themes, none are explored with much depth. Nor is the narrative served by the author's prose, alternately lyrical and breezy. Still, Anne offers plenty of memorable moments. Her earnest, altruistic impulses coexist with a deep misanthropy she can't quite suppress. Spotting a crucifix around someone's neck, she admits her loathing for ''these stupid, sanctimonious ornaments of someone's private belief. What did God care if you advertised your creed?''
The Return Of Munchausen
By Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov. 140 pages. New York Review Books Classics. $14.95.
In recent years, New York Review Books has been reissuing works by this neglected Russian master, who was not published in his lifetime. (He died at 63 in 1950.) In this witty, whimsical novella, the much-mythologized 18th-century German baron, Hieronymus von Munchausen, is imaginatively conjured. Familiar elements remain, including the baron's famously upturned pigtail, which once supposedly pulled him and his horse from a swamp. And of course, Munchausen is a raconteur extraordinaire, filled with tall tales and very much full of himself. His greatest pleasure is the sound of his own voice, and his perorations rouse audiences to standing ovations and the kind of ardor summoned at a Justin Bieber concert. (The baron's devoted followers are known as Munchauseniads.) Mr. Krzhizhanovsky's plot, such as it is, takes Munchausen through 1920s Berlin, London and Moscow as a freewheeling diplomat-secret agent -- though he spends most of his time philosophizing, smoking his pipe and reeling off postprandial aphorisms. (Of horses and voters, he says, ''if you do not put blinkers on them, they will throw you into the nearest ditch.'') Munchausen's trusted confidant, the poet Ernst Unding -- whose name translates as ''Earnest Nonsense'' -- gently challenges the details of his friend's long-winded stories and departures from ''the trammels of truth.'' Munchausen can't help himself. His perceptions do not extend much beyond ''the radius of his fedora,'' and his delight in bending reality as he pleases seems almost childlike, and utterly charming.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ciuraru, Carmela. "Review: 'Small Admissions,' 'Freebird' and More." New York Times, 26 Dec. 2016, p. C5(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475010427&it=r&asid=cf19c66e5fd524cba27242dca0af95fe. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475010427
The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza
FICTION
Author:
Parisa Reza
Translator:
Adriana Hunter
The cover to The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa RezaNew York. Europa Editions. 2016. 259 pages.
Parisa Reza’s novel The Gardens of Consolation takes us into the lives of an Iranian couple, Sardar and Talla, from their youth to their middle ages, later shifting its focus to their only son, Bahram. The story travels from rural Iran to its capital on a tapestry that stretches from 1910 to 1953, the year the US and UK-backed coup d’état toppled Prime Minister Mosaddegh from power, hindering the democratic movements of Iranian society.
The book opens with the twelve-year-old Talla and the twenty-year-old Sardar, married three years prior, leaving the village where “at the gates of hell and the source of Paradise, blooms Mohamed’s flower,” where the best rosewater in the country is produced. They travel through the desert all the way to Varamin, south of Tehran, where Sardar has already bought some livestock to make his living.
The book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter focuses more on Talla’s life in the village while she waits for Sardar to come back from Tehran and fetch her. The second is the story of the couple as they build their lives in Varamin and later in Shemiran and try to have a child. The remainder are focused more on Bahram’s life story; from a son of “peasants” to a young man accepted to university, trying “to distance himself from his background,” getting involved with political parties, and trying to figure out his relationships with women.
To tell the story of the Amir family, Reza chooses a style and tone that reminds one of a fairy tale. Reading The Gardens of Consolation feels like being on a flying carpet with your grandmother and listening to her telling you, in a nonchalant dreamy tone, a bedtime story about once upon a time in a fantasy world. It is magical, sometimes shocking and sometimes familiar. It dramatizes some details and disregards others, lingers on little moments and skips large spans of time, letting this family of three take you into the historical trajectory of a society undergoing rapid, vast changes—economically, politically, socially, and personally; domestically and internationally.
Throughout the narrative, Reza explains many of the historical events and aspects of this society—for example, its rituals and traditions, limitations, hopes, etc.—that are unknown to a reader who may be foreign to this world and people. Her style and tone, however, allow her to weave these explanations into the story while avoiding disruption of the narrative line, and instead letting everything flow softly together.
This ease could also stem from the fact that Reza’s original work is in French. The story is already in a language foreign to the language of the place and people she is writing about, aimed for a foreign audience, making it already a translation of sorts. It thus relieves the English translator from the need to accommodate that change of audience, wondering how to explain all this, risking harming the narrative flow and consistency by adding necessary fill-ins.
The aim of Reza’s narrative seems not to be providing its reader with complex characters or deep, multilayered analysis of its events but rather taking its readers on a long and widespread journey to this faraway time and place. If you approach The Gardens of Consolation with such a mind-set, you are in for a beautiful tour de force of a novel.
Poupeh Missaghi
New York
The Gardens of Consolation
By Adriana Hunter (trans.), Parisa Reza
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In her debut novel, Parisa Reza presents a simple, beautiful story of two Iranian peasants, Sardar and his wife, Talla, who leave their secure village—a paradise—for the wider world. As they make their way across the mountains, they suffer many hardships, including the loss of two children. Talla wants nothing more than to settle down to a place she can call home, and Sardar is determined to provide such a place for his green-eyed and lovely wife.
Set in the 1920s, the novel follows this couple through the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi and the forced adaptation toWestern culture. Though Talla must trade her chador for more modern clothes, she remains in her heart a very traditional Iranian woman.
This novel is reminiscent of Steinbeck’s The Pearl with its fable-like quality and beautiful writing. Reza presents to the reader a very different view of Iran than that reported by newspapers and magazines. Though Reza left the country when she was 17, the land has made an indelible mark on her. Her love for the struggling shepherds and farmers is palpable. As a result, The Gardens of Consolation is a lovely book filled with both heartbreak and hope.
Review
Appeared in
HNR Issue 79 (February 2017)
Reviewed by
Anne Clinard Barnhill
'The Gardens of Consolation' spans six decades of Iranian history
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A novel of Iran in the decades leading to Revolution is both a love story and a political epic.
By Anna Mundow, The Barnes & Noble Review February 13, 2017
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Parisa Reza’s luminous first novel, The Gardens of Consolation, ends with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 but begins centuries earlier. Or so it seems. The opening scene, certainly, evokes an ancient land. “To the east, bare earth, as far as the eye can see. To the west, hills, in places crumpled as a camel’s hide, on others smooth as a woman’s breast.”
A young wife, riding a donkey, crosses the desert, her husband walking beside her, leaving her birthplace for the first time. “In Ghamsar, at the gates of hell and the source of paradise, blooms Mohamed’s flower; it is here, in this village, to the west of the scorching desert of the Iranian plateau, that the Persian rose grows.” Here, Reza writes, “the wind does not raise dust but spreads the smell of roses.” The atmosphere is heady, sumptuous; each page seems scented with rosewater. Then suddenly an automobile roars past. To Talla, the monster is “a black headless hulk with bulging eyes… its round feet powering toward her at inconceivable speed.” She is, after all, only 12 and this is only the year 1299, according to the Iranian calendar. That is 1918 by Western reckoning, but Reza waits almost 50 pages before translating the date.
From this dreamlike beginning onward, as Reza follows the lives of Talla, her husband, Sardar, and later their son, Bahram, she keeps us mildly disoriented. One of her chapters, for example, begins, “On the first day of fall in 1331, when Harry S. Truman was president of the United States….” Later we learn that the US coup against the reformer Mohammad Mossadegh occurs on “Mordad 28th, 1332.” For an Iranian writer mapping complex terrain – both personal and political – this is a clever tactic. Familiar historical events are lifted out of known historical time and the reader, briefly wrong-footed, pays closer attention. Reza’s main characters, too, though vivid and substantial, seem timeless. “It is these masters who carry the world,” Sardar reassures himself. “If he were offered the opportunity, what would he decide? Nothing. Everything is right as it is: the land, the flock, water, tobacco.”
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Talla and Sardar endure political upheavals and personal tragedies. Illiterate, shrewd, and resilient, they inhabit a world ruled as much by superstition as by the shah, accumulating land and placing all their hopes in their brilliant son. They are familiar types, and Reza, for the most part, spares them complex inner lives. Like a sympathetic anthropologist, she delineates the emotions and responses of her characters as though inviting us to observe rather than empathize. Of bereaved Talla, for example, Reza writes, “the winds of life carry her as she leaves one place for another, heavy with the memories of a death. She follows the road, such is her sorrow.”
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Yet the compressed force of Reza’s language not only commands our attention but also creates a subtle, brooding suspense that intensifies as her narrative proceeds inexorably toward revolution. Six decades are spanned in five sections, beginning with “Havva, the Innocence of Hell” and ending with “Elaheh, Goddess of Shipwrecked Souls,” Havva being Talla’s young sister, who dies following a horrifying punishment by their father, and Elaheh a fellow student who loves Bahram but marries an older intellectual.
For all the tumult that it portrays, however, "The Gardens of Consolation" is a serene epic that proceeds at a stately pace. In this translation from the French, (Reza was born in Tehran in 1965 but has lived in France since the age of 17), even the most brutal act is described with almost magisterial composure. “A scream of pain and disbelief tore through the half light and hit them full in the face before reverberating around the whole village,” Reza writes of Havva’s torture. “Then the wind picked up the child’s wail and carried it off into the mountains.” And decades later, as a violent coup rages, Bahram watches a veteran revolutionary “calmly and carefully dropping papers into the flames one by one. As if defeat has become familiar to him ... all that matters is the road you take, and that road leads from one disaster to the next.”
In the breadth and wry fatalism of her vision, Reza reveals her debt to Iranian women writers such as Simin Daneshvar and, more recently, Goli Taraghi, both of whom are included in the invaluable 2011 anthology "Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East," edited by Reza Aslan. So rooted, indeed, is Parisa Reza’s writing in the fertile soil of Iran that "The Gardens of Consolation" seems to contain an entire nation.