| Title | : | Seasons of Purgatory |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 208 |
| Publication | : | First published January 25, 2022 |
Seasons of Purgatory Reviews
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This is first time I've read Mandanipour, and I can understand his reputation as a literary stylist. Taken individually, the stories in this collection were uniformly good: richly textured with a sensibility that blends the lived experience of those stuck in Tehran with a hint of the magical. Taken as a collection, though, the work left me a bit unsatisfied. The stories felt like variations on the same idea, exploring the liminal space that middle class Iranians find themselves in. That's largely the point of the collection but it left me unsatisfied as a reader. There's also the problem, as others have pointed out, of the lack of female characters with agency in this collection. Again, that's not necessarily an issue with any individual story, but when the whole collection is so male-centric, it's a bit off-putting.
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Long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award for Literature in Translation!
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: The first English-language story collection from “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” (Guardian)
In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.
Shahriar Mandanipour is an award-winning, exiled Iranian author and journalist who served in the Iran-Iraq war. His fiction has been published throughout the world, including two acclaimed novels published in English. He lives in California.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Men, men, men...all men, all the time. Even when a female person appears, she isn't really given anything to do except respond to the men around her. There's a lot of that down to the war background that the stories share; a lot of serious issues in war just don't make room for women. The war happens to all the characters, in all the time-frames and settings the different stories take place in. Nothing about these particular men says they are, or feel, in control of too much in their different worlds.
The disorientation of the world as it is run by totalitarians is evident in the slightly seasick sensation of being tossed from time-frame to time-frame between and within stories. Occasionally we are placed in medias res within a thought or a sentence. It does what it's intended to do and leaves the reader unsure, not in control, just as the characters are not. The author is not yclept with "award-winning" for playing it safe, after all. He doesn't spoon-feed one's imagination but requires us to attend to the words and images we're presented in order to derive our full measure of aesthetic pleasure from them.
I've used my reasonable and customary Bryce Method of story-by-story discussion
on my blog. -
Format: audiobook
Author: Shahriar Mandanipour ~ Title: Seasons of Purgatory ~ Narrator: Fajer Al-Kaisi
Content: 4 stars ~ Narration: 5 stars
Complete audiobook review
Seasons of the Purgatory is a collection of nine short stories from the Iranian author Shahriar Mandanipour. It is not an easy read. Many of the stories are like they were taken from someone’s purgatory. Topics are pretty diverse and explore modern life, traditions, love, jealousy, atrocities of war, and more. Many are sad, brutal, or heartbreaking. Like always with short stories, some are better than others. But, for me, with every story, they were getting better.
I liked the writing. The narrator is a Canadian-Iraqi actor Fajer Al-Kaisi. His voice is clear and easy to listen to. He uses some minor differences in pronunciation, so it sounded more authentic. I liked it.
Thanks to HighBridge Audio for the ALC and this opportunity! This is a voluntary review and all opinions are my own. -
2.5 stars
The first story in this collection really worked well for me with an older, widowed male character who becomes obsessed with the animals in the zoo next door. Several of the stories feature animals -often in a threatening role- there is a viper that lives in a family house where the children are forced to live with their father or lose their inheritance, one where a leopard steals a child and another where a dog is perceived as a threat by a village but is a friend to a tortured soldier who has come to do his service there.
Lots of the stories feature war -specifically the Iran/Iraq war -particularly the title story and the inclusion of animals often seems to be making the point that very little separates us from them, that we can be as brutal and violent but with far less cause. Even in the stories which do not feature war directly it is often in the background as with ‘If She Had no Coffin’ about a small child whose father indulges her imaginary friend or ‘Seven Captains’ which is about a man who tries to elope with a married woman who is then stoned.
Women don’t feature very heavily and when they do don't have much agency and a lot of the stories deal with very masculine themes and perspective which I’ve realized doesn’t always work for me, but I think my greater issue with the stories was the writing style itself. Some of the stories will jump between past and present without clear indications where you are and it’s not always clear who is speaking; I found myself getting frustrated while reading even when I was interested in the topics of the story.
Added to this, during my reading of this collection I was also reading
Afsaneh: Short Stories by Iranian Womenand found that collection more enjoyable both in style, voice and content so this suffered by comparison. I imagine some of this is probably a personal taste issue but either way I’m still glad I read this collection to enlarge my perspective on Iranian Literature and Iranian short stories in particular. -
4 stars
An excellent set of short stories in translation, full of variety, fluid prose, & compelling narratives.
[What I liked:]
•Man, this is a really great collection of short stories! Each one is poignant & well written without becoming repetitive; the painful moments are sketched with subtlety & avoid melodramatics; and the moments that are very relatable feel familiar & well-observed without being trite.
•The stories that stood out to me the most were the one about hunting a leopard, the one about grieving parents who are deprived of the chance to visit their child’s grave, and one about an tragic affair.
[What I didn’t like as much:]
•I pretty much liked every story, but most are pretty sad & some discuss violence. Don’t read it if you’re depressed, I guess.
CW: sexism, murder, physical violence, domestic violence, war, death of a child, infidelity
[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!] -
A collection of 9 short stories, 5 of which are pretty good. However even the stronger stories tend to throw the reader in without context and you spend the first few pages trying to orient yourself to what is going on.
The otherwise pretentiously written synopsis describes these stories as being about "the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions." The stories that stuck to these themes were the best, such as the title story about an Iraqi defector shot and wounded before he could reach the Iranian side, or the story about three brothers forced to live in their repressive ancestral home after having lived free lives.
I was struck by the lack of female perspectives in this book. One sentence reads "The captain's wife spoke little" and that about sums up most of the women who are generally very stoic or sometimes very emotional. The symbolism in these stories was also a little heavy-handed for me. -
YESSSSS!!! This was everything.
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DNF
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Season of purgatory is a collection of nine tales beautifully written and extremely well narrated.
The accounts are not linear, some happen in the past, some in the present, time varies even within a story. It is hard to decipher what is real and what is not. There are a lot of metaphors, monologues and internal dialogue, flashbacks, the narrative feels confusing and at times disjointed, but I feel that is what the author is going after.
There are some redundant themes across multiple tales such as strange relationships between human and animals, the seasons, men and nature, struggles of opposites. Only one character appears in more than one story. There is not closure to any of the narratives and most of them are pretty disturbing with an abundance of gore, fighting, injustice, oppositions, and violence, letting the reader wonder about the final outcome.
Perhaps because the cultural background, I found it hard to relate to any of the narratives. Despite that the narration is very good, a printed copy would be easier to follow as re-reading and slow reading would be a plus in this book.
Thank you #NetGalley and #HighBridgeAudio for an advanced copy of Seasons of Purgatory and the opportunity to provide some feedback to this audiobook. #SeasonsofPurgatory -
Good book that introduces me to Iranian culture.
Women on this book mainly just as a side characters. Some stories made me amused, Shahriar wrote it beautifully (or is it the translator that makes it more flawless?) -
One of those books that compels you to ponder and ruminate. Brilliant and heartbreaking and visceral.
The reader is dropped into each of the stories (sometimes mid-sentence or thought) which depict a traumatic event that is unfolding or is about to occur. The reader must decipher the story, figure out who is at the heart of the narrative, situate herself in place and time. As each story reveals itself, so too does the pain, grief and torture inflicted by war, totalitarianism, cultural fanaticism.
I admit feeling adrift and lost with some of these stories, especially the final one, which seems to be the author's life story-the experience of being in exile and unable to return home. Regardless, the universal sadness of losing a child or a lover, of going to war, of losing country and home--all of that loss resonates profoundly. -
Mandanipour's stories are at times stark and yet have an undertone of gentleness as they examine relationships between man, woman, parents, countries, and the natural world.
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Shahriar Mandanipour writes of Iran as “a land of recurrence,” in support of Iranian protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election to his second presidential term in 2009. Breed after breed of violence from war, revolutions, military coups, and dictatorship swept the country throughout the twentieth century, leaving shadows of madness and fear in nearly every alleyway, sidewalk, and graveyard. The latest English translation of the Iranian journalist and writer’s story collection, Seasons of Purgatory, is set in the ongoing madness and fear of violence in the theocratic republic.
Metaphors and symbols could have started as rhetorical devices to trick censorship, but they may well develop into a signature style of opaque narration of the bitterness of living in constant political, social, and economic stress. They run through the pages, coding the deep criticism of authoritarian governing, memories of unspeakable traumas, and the suppressed hope for freedom in tales. The recurring purgatory is something his people are still dealing with today but may not have found a consistent way to bridge the generational gaps in remembering. But perhaps tales can cross those gaps.
Mandanipour’s own experience in the Iraq-Iran War (1980-1988) adds to the stories personal witness of the significant casualties on both sides. Focusing rather on the afterlife or aftermaths of battles, he veils those characters with a layer of literary opacity that asks the readers to decipher. In the title story, an Iraqi soldier was shot dead by his own army as he attempted surrender. As nature takes apart his body, it seems to give it life beyond the one it just lost. The worms eat off his lips and with the teeth exposed, the face seems to put on a big smile. His emptied eye sockets still stare at the earth while rainwater and snow take turns to fill them. In another, “The Color of Midday Fire,” the captain that faced the Iraqi enemies loses his daughter to an old hunting leopard. As he comes face to face with the beast in his revenge, he is puzzled by the animal’s eyes.
“What else do you think there could be in the eyes of a leopard other than cruelty?”
I said, “Perhaps the colorlessness of death.”
He said, “No, there’s something else in them that troubles me.”
Can it be something larger than all that the captain has believed in war and his training that he saw in those killer’s eyes? We never get to know what it is. But we do know that the mesmerization was strong enough that the revenge didn’t end in casualty.
“If She Has No Coffin” accounts a young girl’s wondering of the whereabouts of her sister’s body. The day Sara never comes back, their city has been relentlessly bombed. Dorna’s demand of her father taking her to Sara’s grave is met with parental lies: Sara was naughty as usual and caught an illness that took her life. As the father-daughter duo pick their way through the rubbles to the cemetery, the question raises whether Sara’s body was ever found and buried and whether it remained in one piece. And there are many more children who died like Sara. How will their siblings live on with questions that the graves don’t answer?
The last story, “If You Didn’t Kill the Cuckoo Bird,” focuses on two prisoners. Solitude from the multi-year sentence turns them into each other’s doppelgängers as they share memories to pass time. Not long after, their memories bleed into each other. The blurring enforced by the extremely confined space of terror and punishment confuses not just their pasts — where they came from, who their families were, what sorrow they have experienced — but their identities and sense of self. When the day comes for one of them to be released after nine years behind the bar, who answers the warden’s call and leaves, and who stays behind? Is it madness or betrayal if the one who should have stayed longer gets out? It’s not just pain that lingers, but these questions that never get answered. They continue to ring in the no-man’s-land in your head after the last page is closed. -
My first impressions (Writing down my first impressions of the book. NOT an in-depth review. Reviews are based on personal enjoyment.)
RANK: No Rank
I think this is my first short story collection I’ve read. So, this review is a bit challenging to write.
There are two stories that I like from this collection. “Mummy and honey” and “the color of Midday Fire”
Mummy and Honey are my favorite story. I intrepid the story as the three brothers suffering from Generational trauma. The Viper being a physical manifestation of the trauma. No matter what the brothers and the women do, the Viper will always stay in the house. The ending fits well with the theme.
The Color of Midday Fire is a good story. A Father loses his daughter to a Leopard and spends the whole story trying to kill it. This is a great quote “I couldn’t... I just couldn’t. My child’s flesh is in its body ...My child’s blood runs in its veins...I couldn’t”
Another quote I like from Shadows of the Cave “Ugliness is repetitive beauty”
The rest of the stories were alright. Mandanipour’s prose is a bit flowery while some scenes are beautifully written at times it can drag and distract from the story. I do wish I had a bit from knowledge of Iran culture. This would have helped me understand the stories and the themes.
Overall, borrow this collection from the library to give it a chance. -
Reading this feels like im inside the head of an old Persian dude. The main characters of these stories are always fallible, mordant, and neurotic and in a way I assume only war can make you. The weaving mundanity to spirit and horror was so well executed . Animals, though entirely sublunarly, are depicted as the keepers of truth, dignity, and tradition while the humans around them descend to chaos in their to the attempts to eradicate the beasts. Often the animals are regarded with more mercy than people, as if they represent a supreme innocence despite the terror they inflict.
Mandanipour is truly gifted in that he can write stories that seem entirely meaningless and nonsensical until the last sentence, when u are gifted with his genius provocation amid the absurdity. Im forgoing a feminist analysis here bc everyone else has commented on it—dude CANNOT write women and i almost wish women were excluded entirely from this narrative.
My favorite stories were “Seasons of Purgatory” “Color of Midday Fire” and “If You Didnt Kill the Cuckoo Bird”
3.5 -
Kicking off my 2022 National Book Award reading with this compelling story collection from the literature in translation list. Mandanipour does a lot of interesting things with narrative standpoint: there's not a lot of hand-holding in initially explaining who is narrating the story to whom and from what distance, and the energy of a lot of these stories is in the accumulation of disconcerting details until an underlying image is revealed in sudden clarity. There's a lot in these stories about the animality of humanity, and where the deepest pits of our emotions take us, and I'm going to be haunted forever more by the two Captain Meena stories especially.
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Cuentos breves con una narrativa muy propia, nueva para mi. Dos cuentos son de una belleza y fuerza demoledoras. Todos ellos alrededor de los cambios políticos, la guerra y la dificultad que enfrentó Irán en el s. XX.
Todos los cuentos son trágicos pero algunos se perciben desde la ternura. La crueldad es el común denominador pero el lugar no es victimista sino en momentos incluso bello. -
From the exiled Iranian author and journalist, this book is a series of short, dense stories about life in all its variations (but most often its tragedy) in Iran. The stories are primarily darkly comic, and my favourites of the collection were “Shadows of the Cave” and “Seasons of Purgatory”.
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pretty haunting; certainly agree with some criticisms, namely how male centric it tends to be
but wow how haunting it persists all throughout; love the reliance on magic to build on and even assuage great life haunts -
Thank you to NetGalley
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*received for free from netgalley for honest review* interesting and certainly different read, would consider rereading i suppose but really feel i missed something lol
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3,5
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The collections of stories were pretty good, my favorites were If You Didn't Kill the Cuckoo Bird, Shatter the Stone Tooth, Color of Midday Fire, and Seven Captains.
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I have no idea what I just read if it was real or imaginary. Story takes place in Asia and deals with communism and the old world order in China plus poverty thanks superstition.
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Two things: Each story is so disorienting and hard to follow for pages. And women are actually people too.
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good book
