'Censoring an Iranian Love Story' by Shahriar Mandanipour
Book review
In the novel, a writer tries to tell a tale of romance in spite of, and sometimes with inspiration from, the censor.
Censorship is an endlessly fascinating subject; a puzzle box, a Russian nesting doll in which the writer's truth is buried and often lost. Czeslaw Milosz's 1953 classic "The Captive Mind" revealed the insidious and creative ways that censorship enters and inhabits the mind of the artist. Shahriar Mandanipour, an Iranian film critic and the editor of a literary journal in Iran, was not allowed to publish fiction from 1992 to 1997. He came to the United States in 2006. "Censoring an Iranian Love Story" is his first book published in English. In this novel, a writer (also named Shahriar Mandanipour and the author's alter ego) tries to write the story of Sara and Dara, a young couple in love, and finds himself in a metaphorical burka. He is forced to change his story, characters and dialogue to comply with the restrictions of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the person of a Dostoevskian character, Mr. Petrovich.
"I am an Iranian writer tired of writing dark and bitter stories," he tells his reader, "stories populated by ghosts and dead narrators with predictable endings of death and destruction. I am a writer who at the threshold of fifty has understood that the purportedly real world around us has enough death and destruction and sorrow, and that I did not have the right to add even more defeat and hopelessness to it with my stories." The key word here is, of course, "purportedly."
Censorship, seen as its own art form, is just another way of messing with reality. It's hard enough to generate one's own ideas without having someone else's superimposed over them, but the fictional Mandanipour tries. Nonetheless, things are crossed out, political and sexual, that will prevent his book from being published. He finds soaring metaphors to replace simple, yet offensive actions. "In each other's eyes they read many unspoken and unthinkable words," begins one section, and then the following, crossed out: "words of repressed yearnings and desires. And in each other's eyes they see images of forbidden words, words such as 'kiss,' 'pomegranate,' 'milk and honey,' and 'oyster.' " He writes a love story that is convincingly, achingly impossible in a place where men and women cannot even look at each other in public. The effect (as every good Victorian understood) is deliriously sensual prose. Even Mr. Petrovich falls in love with the woman in the story. She is that unrealistic. He asks the writer if he could somehow meet her. "No," says Mandanipour, "If you wanted, for example, to meet Anna Karenina, I could perhaps find a way, but. . . . "
