Product Description

A superb, authoritatively written insider's account of one of the most mysterious but significant and powerful nations in the world: Iran. Few historians and journalists writing in English have been able to meaninfully examine post-revolutionary Iranian life. Years after his death, the shadow of Ayatollah Khomeini still looms over Shi'ite Islam and Iranian politics, the state of the nation fought over by conservatives and radicals. They are contending for the soul of a revolutionary Islamic government that terrified the Western establishment and took them to leadership of the Islamic world. But times have changed. Khomeini's death and the deficiencies of his successor, the intolerance and corruption that has made the regime increasingly authoritarian and cynical, frustration at Iran's economic isolation and the revolution's failure to deliver the just realm it promised has transformed the spirit of the country. In this superbly crafted and deeply thoughtful book Christopher de Bellaigue, who is married to an Iranian and has lived there for many years, gives us the voices and memories of this 'worn-out generation': be they traders or soldiers, film-makers or clerics, writers or taxi-drivers, gangsters or reformists. These are voices that are never heard, but whose lives and concerns are forging the future of one of the most secretive, misunderstood countries in the world. The result is a subtle yet intense revelation of the hearts and minds of the Iranian people.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #863710 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-01
• Released on: 2005-01-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This portrait of the Islamist revolution's heartland is far from the "axis of evil" caricature so often associated with the regime that held Americans hostage in 1979–1980 and is actively pursuing nuclear arms today. Rather, Ballaigue, who covers Iran for the Economist, presents a textured view of a complex society, struggling with an ancient culture, a radical ideology and a Westernized elite. Drawing inspiration from George Orwell, who chronicled the Catalonian revolution of the 1930s and its betrayal by Stalinists, Ballaiguecharts the Islamist revolution from its origins in the repressive regime of the Shah and the fiery sermons of the Ayatollah Khomeini, through its triumph and the taking of the hostages of the "Great Satan," the war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Iran-Contra scandal and the waning of the Islamist revolutionary fervor as educated Iranians became disillusioned with the mullahs and thirsted for greater cultural and intellectual freedom. The book is peppered with interviews with and vignettes of the many Iranians the author has met during his years in Iran; the title refers to a cemetery in Tehran where the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war are interred—"rose garden" being an ironic rendition of rows of headstones. (On sale Jan. 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
If Pollack's Persian Puzzle [BKL D 1 04] is the policy wonk's view of today's Iran, British journalist de Bellaigue's memoir is closer to the ground. Outsiders might see Iran as an emerging nuclear threat, but de Bellaigue also sees a country terribly spent from decades of autocratic rule, revolution, ultrafundamentalism, a ruinous war with Iraq, the Iran-Contra scandal, and ongoing hostilities with America. The author, who lives in Iran and writes for the New York Review of Books and the economist, discusses these issues at length, but he also guides us through city streets and into the lives of Iranian citizens. There is Mr. Zarif, who agitated for the Ayatollah's return to Iran and now wonders why his Iranian-manufactured Paykan car is so poorly built. And the war veteran Amini, whose forehead carries 60 pieces of shrapnel and who has resigned himself to letting Esfahan teens dance in public. Readers will find here a detailed picture of Iranian life that has too long been out of reach. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A highly original and complex portrait of the Islamic republic." -- BusinessWeek

"A highly original and disturbing portrait of the Islamic republic." -- BusinessWeek

"An important book that deserves to be read by both defenders and detractors of the Islamic republic." -- Times Literary Supplement

"An intimate exploration of the revolution’s denouement...The intellectual honesty de Bellaigue brings to bear is worthy of praise." -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"De Bellaigue gives us a sense of daily life in Iran . . . cynical, conflicted, and bitter, yet surprisingly vibrant." -- Chronicle of Higher Education

"De Bellaigue is a defiantly literary writer, and he gives us a sense of Tehran [that is] immediate and insistent." -- Pico Iyer, New York Times Book Review

"De Bellaigue’s . . . anecdotes and interviews provide tremendously valuable context for many of today’s headlines." -- Washington Post Book World

"Incisive analysis. . . . Through eloquent human stories, Bellaigue frames the murky politics of Iran in a telling, intimate scale." -- Newsweek International

"Powerful...impressionistic glimpses of everyday life in Iran...De Bellaigue narrates the unexpected trajectory of these individuals’ lives with verve." -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Readers will find here a detailed picture of Iranian life that has too long been out of reach." -- Booklist

Customer Reviews

Jaundiced Lenses for the Rose Garden
Someone implying to come from the upper-crust of the European society and having married into an upper-class Iranian family is trying to write about everyday culture and custom of the regular Iranian populace. It is a worthy attempt and it can be done - and has been done - but Mr. de Bellaigue was not very successful at it!

One of the first hints of their upper-crust-ness comes early in the book, a few pages after he talks about Cardinal Maximilian de Furstenberg representing the Vatican during a celebration in Iran and how his grandmother "always referred to him as Uncle Max"; he accuses the Iranians around him to be "terrific name droppers". It takes one to know one. Later he relates a story of how his wife Bita, responds to a beggar woman's blessing with "choice insults" and for him not to see anything wrong with her actions and then sharing it with the rest of us simply reeks of self-perceived nobility and arrogance of the landed gentry. Unfortunately this "aristocratic" mentality colors everything he sees around him negatively and in black.

There are two facets to this book. One the discourse on general Iranian society and culture, and the second the eight year war with Iraq. On the former the book is grossly lacking and what it conveys are only through jaundiced eyes. On the aspect of the war the book is more valuable because it relays some historical facts. There are things to be learned from it as long as the reader takes care to discard any personal and subjective interjections that the author makes. Of course he fills some of the historical voids with a vivid imagination - mostly qualifying them with maybes and perhapses but sometimes letting it pass as facts.

The problem that I have with the first facet of the book is that it is littered with gratuitous insults to Iranians and things Iranian. Granted, all subtly hidden but insults nevertheless. For example:

* One of the characters he has chosen to represent the average post-revolutionary Iranian is someone that he himself labels a "delinquent, a thug, a menace to society" and uses him as an example of an average Iranian! Would anyone get away with picking, following, and writing about an inner-city gang-banger - even one who has changed his ways - as representing the majority of Americans? I doubt it.

* Driving through streets while documenting "former names" of each road he passes he mentions a square with:
"...a scum of shared taxis." Is it the taxi itself that is scum or the fact that it is shared? Or maybe just the people sharing it. Also, what is the significance of giving the previous names of roads and highways? The names were changed 25 years ago for ideological reasons and/or to honor a fallen soldier, but so what? By meticulously documenting the "old" names of the roads he is just placating his immediate peers and monarchists that to this day refuse to use the new names for the main reason of: "The Shahanshah (king of kings) himself had named this road and no one is authorized to change it but HIM"! A royal fatwa if you will.

* On mullahs and their seminary cells (not unlike a monk's cell) where they live and study, he writes:
"If they marry, their cells may be passed on to a son, with familiar smells and unwashed tea things." Why the "unwashed"? Are they all dirty? Not to mention the obvious - like what happens to the cell while the mullah is married, moved out, and awaiting his son to be born and come of age? Is it kept empty for years with the unwashed tea things inside, or will they wash it and then dirty it up before the son is about to move in?

* While meeting a subject over lunch he describes the food:
"The kebabs were filthy, recently defrosted and served with insipid rice cooked with yesterday's oil." And of course after such a fitting meal for a gourmand that can even date the cooking oil one has to have "dead bag in tepid water" for tea!

* Passing a group of 20 sleeping travelers in a park he observes that they ALL wear polyester trousers, and ALL smell of sweat AND "decomposing meat in the gaps between their teeth"!

* A vet who has lost his legs in the war "bounded like a chimp"

* The red carpet in someone's house is "lurid"! For a country that is renowned for its carpets, he manages to see and describe only two of them, the lurid one and then when he is meeting 10 war veterans in a park they are sitting on a rug that has "the image of a nine-year-old girl with a perm and blue eyeliner."

* Politicians "inclined to stubble and greasy suits"! (How do you grease up a suit by the way? I wouldn't mind one myself. It would make it easy to put on and take off.)

* Even fictional characters in novels are not free of his stabs. A fictional character's title that roughly corresponds to a baroness or lady is referred to as "absurd and self-regarding sobriquet"! Good thing uncle Max is not around the read this.

* Tea houses are "coarse and dirty"

* Iranian bread is like a "mattress"

* From how vigorously a person exercises in a gym he guesses "that he let out a lot of aggression in 1979."

* From a shrug of a mother of dead soldier to the question of if she hangs out with other mothers that have sons killed in the war, he surmises that she is saying she is better than them and would not hang out with the riffraff. Not that it may simply mean "Not Really.", "Why?", "To what purpose?", or "It will not bring my son back."

These and other examples of underhanded pokes that make fun of and insult local customs no matter how irrelevant or banal is what gets on my nerves most about this book. Like when he talks about "sowan - the parched caramel, embedded with pistachio shards, that masquerades as a local speciality"! It is as though some one writing about history of the US post Vietnam and touching on Kennedy's election campaign in Chicago would suddenly take time to mention Chicago-style pizza as a "rubbery, doughy concoction, embedded with pepperoni, that masquerades as food!" It is rude and irrelevant not to mention distracting to the subject at hand.

And talking about distracting this book has taken a page straight out of the Tarantino's "linear story-telling is not the only game in town" and then added a few gimmicks of its own by filling it with inappropriate hackneyed interjections. There is so much jumping back and forth in time, from person to person, and place to place that it not only confuses the reader but it almost makes the book unreadable.

And I assume just to be able to withstand any complaints like the ones I make he has thrown in "Iran has beauty and ugliness in the same elusive hue." Sure. And you would be hard pressed to find any of the beauty in this particular book - it is elusive, after all. Just like the closet racist that after hours of ranting against a people ends by "but don't get me wrong I ain't got nothin' against them people, as a matter of fact some of my best friends are blacks."

Plus sometimes there are some shocking errors in the book that cast doubt on other areas. For example on page 67 he mentions a character that "trimmed his beard, rather than shaved it, for revolutionary grooming contends that shaving is a Western effeminacy." If he had done basic research - very basic, like asking the first passerby in the street - why people trim their beard rather than shave, he would have known that it has absolutely nothing to do with the revolution but because Islam requires it. After all if you can't fact check a basic thing like the reason for not shaving then how can I trust the fact checking on other issues? But I guess after the scandal of "A Million Little Pieces" and how the publishers came out on mass in their own defense saying that genre of "memoirs" are not fact checked and are considered somewhat fiction - something they claimed everyone in the publishing industry is aware of but the general public needs to be educated about - then I shouldn't be surprised. It does say on the cover "A memoir of Iran"!

It really is a sad truth that we live in a time that an intelligent educated man like Mr. de Bellaigue uses all his gifts to malign. It is rare to feel such venom in the works of an author that lives in Iran and is married to an Iranian but that is what comes across most in this book. All he is interested in doing, as he himself tells it after "regretting" for having told a truth (!) is to "jab a needle into Mr. Zarif's smug, certain shell." Except what he really wants to do is not just to jab one person but the whole of a nation.

In conclusion, if you are not Iranian and read this book, you will get an impression that has very little to do with Iran and Iranians. But if you are Iranian and can look past the venom there are some interesting aspect of Iranian culture and way of life that you will be introduced to. Aspects that an outsider can have a better view of and explain more objectively. And finally if you are one of Iranian monarchists living in Southern California or the suburbs of DC you will be in heaven. I am sure Mr. de Bellaigue will autograph your copy with pleasure.

Well written and insightful, but not the complete picture
Mr. de Bellaigue's prose is superb and he had many interesting experiences in Iran; It is obvious he wore out a lot of shoe leather writing this book. We are treated to a host of eclectic characters, from the daughter of murdered secular dissidents, to disillusioned former revolutionaries cum reformists, as well as the plight of everday Iranians who are getting by in a poorly managed, authoritarian theocracy.

The problem I had with the book was Mr. de. Bellaigue's focus on seeing Iran through the lense of Shiite Islam. At one point he makes the absurd statement that "It is every Iranians' dream to go to Karballah (Iraq)". Anyone who spends more than a day in Tehran will see how hollow statements like these ring.

Overall the book was very good, but if you're going to only read one book on contemporary Iran it should be Afshin Molavi's Persian Pilgrimages, which is in a class by itself.

Jaundiced Lenses for the Rose Garden
Someone implying to come from the upper-crust of the European society and having married into an upper-class Iranian family is trying to write about everyday culture and custom of the regular Iranian populace. It is a worthy attempt and it can be done - and has been done - but Mr. de Bellaigue was not very successful at it!

One of the first hints of their upper-crust-ness comes early in the book, a few pages after he talks about Cardinal Maximilian de Furstenberg representing the Vatican during a celebration in Iran and how his grandmother "always referred to him as Uncle Max"; he accuses the Iranians around him to be "terrific name droppers". It takes one to know one. Later he relates a story of how his wife Bita, responds to a beggar woman's blessing with "choice insults" and for him not to see anything wrong with her actions and then sharing it with the rest of us simply reeks of self-perceived nobility and arrogance of the landed gentry. Unfortunately this "aristocratic" mentality colors everything he sees around him negatively and in black.

There are two facets to this book. One the discourse on general Iranian society and culture, and the second the eight year war with Iraq. On the former the book is grossly lacking and what it conveys are only through jaundiced eyes. On the aspect of the war the book is more valuable because it relays some historical facts. There are things to be learned from it as long as the reader takes care to discard any personal and subjective interjections that the author makes. Of course he fills some of the historical voids with a vivid imagination - mostly qualifying them with maybes and perhapses but sometimes letting it pass as facts.

The problem that I have with the first facet of the book is that it is littered with gratuitous insults to Iranians and things Iranian. Granted, all subtly hidden but insults nevertheless. For example:

* One of the characters he has chosen to represent the average post-revolutionary Iranian is someone that he himself labels a "delinquent, a thug, a menace to society" and uses him as an example of an average Iranian! Would anyone get away with picking, following, and writing about an inner-city gang-banger - even one who has changed his ways - as representing the majority of Americans? I doubt it.

* Driving through streets while documenting "former names" of each road he passes he mentions a square with:
"...a scum of shared taxis." Is it the taxi itself that is scum or the fact that it is shared? Or maybe just the people sharing it. Also, what is the significance of giving the previous names of roads and highways? The names were changed 25 years ago for ideological reasons and/or to honor a fallen soldier, but so what? By meticulously documenting the "old" names of the roads he is just placating his immediate peers and monarchists that to this day refuse to use the new names for the main reason of: "The Shahanshah (king of kings) himself had named this road and no one is authorized to change it but HIM"! A royal fatwa if you will.

* On mullahs and their seminary cells (not unlike a monk's cell) where they live and study, he writes:
"If they marry, their cells may be passed on to a son, with familiar smells and unwashed tea things." Why the "unwashed"? Are they all dirty? Not to mention the obvious - like what happens to the cell while the mullah is married, moved out, and awaiting his son to be born and come of age? Is it kept empty for years with the unwashed tea things inside, or will they wash it and then dirty it up before the son is about to move in?

* While meeting a subject over lunch he describes the food:
"The kebabs were filthy, recently defrosted and served with insipid rice cooked with yesterday's oil." And of course after such a fitting meal for a gourmand that can even date the cooking oil one has to have "dead bag in tepid water" for tea!

* Passing a group of 20 sleeping travelers in a park he observes that they ALL wear polyester trousers, and ALL smell of sweat AND "decomposing meat in the gaps between their teeth"!

* A vet who has lost his legs in the war "bounded like a chimp"

* The red carpet in someone's house is "lurid"! For a country that is renowned for its carpets, he manages to see and describe only two of them, the lurid one and then when he is meeting 10 war veterans in a park they are sitting on a rug that has "the image of a nine-year-old girl with a perm and blue eyeliner."

* Politicians "inclined to stubble and greasy suits"! (How do you grease up a suit by the way? I wouldn't mind one myself. It would make it easy to put on and take off.)

* Even fictional characters in novels are not free of his stabs. A fictional character's title that roughly corresponds to a baroness or lady is referred to as "absurd and self-regarding sobriquet"! Good thing uncle Max is not around the read this.

* Tea houses are "coarse and dirty"

* Iranian bread is like a "mattress"

* From how vigorously a person exercises in a gym he guesses "that he let out a lot of aggression in 1979."

* From a shrug of a mother of dead soldier to the question of if she hangs out with other mothers that have sons killed in the war, he surmises that she is saying she is better than them and would not hang out with the riffraff. Not that it may simply mean "Not Really.", "Why?", "To what purpose?", or "It will not bring my son back."

These and other examples of underhanded pokes that make fun of and insult local customs no matter how irrelevant or banal is what gets on my nerves most about this book. Like when he talks about "sowan - the parched caramel, embedded with pistachio shards, that masquerades as a local speciality"! It is as though some one writing about history of the US post Vietnam and touching on Kennedy's election campaign in Chicago would suddenly take time to mention Chicago-style pizza as a "rubbery, doughy concoction, embedded with pepperoni, that masquerades as food!" It is rude and irrelevant not to mention distracting to the subject at hand.

And talking about distracting this book has taken a page straight out of the Tarantino's "linear story-telling is not the only game in town" and then added a few gimmicks of its own by filling it with inappropriate hackneyed interjections. There is so much jumping back and forth in time, from person to person, and place to place that it not only confuses the reader but it almost makes the book unreadable.

And I assume just to be able to withstand any complaints like the ones I make he has thrown in "Iran has beauty and ugliness in the same elusive hue." Sure. And you would be hard pressed to find any of the beauty in this particular book - it is elusive, after all. Just like the closet racist that after hours of ranting against a people ends by "but don't get me wrong I ain't got nothin' against them people, as a matter of fact some of my best friends are blacks."

Plus sometimes there are some shocking errors in the book that cast doubt on other areas. For example on page 67 he mentions a character that "trimmed his beard, rather than shaved it, for revolutionary grooming contends that shaving is a Western effeminacy." If he had done basic research - very basic, like asking the first passerby in the street - why people trim their beard rather than shave, he would have known that it has absolutely nothing to do with the revolution but because Islam requires it. After all if you can't fact check a basic thing like the reason for not shaving then how can I trust the fact checking on other issues? But I guess after the scandal of "A Million Little Pieces" and how the publishers came out on mass in their own defense saying that genre of "memoirs" are not fact checked and are considered somewhat fiction - something they claimed everyone in the publishing industry is aware of but the general public needs to be educated about - then I shouldn't be surprised. It does say on the cover "A memoir of Iran"!

It really is a sad truth that we live in a time that an intelligent educated man like Mr. de Bellaigue uses all his gifts to malign. It is rare to feel such venom in the works of an author that lives in Iran and is married to an Iranian but that is what comes across most in this book. All he is interested in doing, as he himself tells it after "regretting" for having told a truth (!) is to "jab a needle into Mr. Zarif's smug, certain shell." Except what he really wants to do is not just to jab one person but the whole of a nation.

In conclusion, if you are not Iranian and read this book, you will get an impression that has very little to do with Iran and Iranians. But if you are Iranian and can look past the venom there are some interesting aspect of Iranian culture and way of life that you will be introduced to. Aspects that an outsider can have a better view of and explain more objectively. And finally if you are one of Iranian monarchists living in Southern California or the suburbs of DC you will be in heaven. I am sure Mr. de Bellaigue will autograph your copy with pleasure.