The revolution gets personal

Since then Iran has experienced an Islamic revolution and three decades of theocratic rule. Dowlatabadi,now 71,has gone on to write numerous other books,including The Colonel,just published in US. But still,those in power continue to regard him and his work as subversive.

“As a writer I embarked on a path of creating epic narratives of my country,which necessarily contain a lot of history which has not been written,” Dowlatabadi said.

The Colonel,a novel about the 1979 revolution,is a case in point. The five children of the title character,an officer in the shah’s army,have all taken different political paths. The story unfolds on one rainy night as the colonel is trying to retrieve and bury the body of his youngest daughter,who has been tortured to death for handing out leaflets criticizing the new regime.

“It’s about time everyone even remotely interested in Iran read this novel,” The Independent of London said in a review. The novel was written in the early 1980s,around the time of the events it describes,when people like Dowlatabadi were called in for questioning. “I hid it in a drawer when I finished,” said Dowlatabadi fearing he would be blacklisted.

The Colonel,though available in English and German,does not yet exist in an authorized Persian-language version. Dowlatabadi said he finally submitted the manuscript three years ago to censors at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance,which must approve all books before publication in Iran,but received no response until Iranian readers began clamouring for access to it.

“Finally the vice chairman of books in the ministry read it,” Dowlatabadi said,“and under pressure responded: ‘Yes,it’s a good book. But this is not our understanding of how the revolution occurred.’ So I said,‘But it is my understanding of what occurred.’ In the meantime it’s (the book) still stuck.”

Dowlatabadi was born into a family of farmers in Khorasan,an arid northeastern province bordering Afghanistan. “I would read on the roof of the house with a lamp,” he recalled. “I read War and Peace that way.” At 14,he left for his province’s capital and ultimately for Tehran,working as a shoemaker,barber,street barker,cotton picker and cinema ticket taker before falling in with a theatre troupe and becoming an actor.

It was the theatre and some incursions into journalism,that pushed him into writing novels and screenplays.

To have The Colonel published in Persian,Dowlatabadi could theoretically turn to one of the emigre presses that flourish in Europe and California or,authorize a kind of samizdat edition for circulation in Iran. But he said he did not want to do that.

“My philosophy,my way of working,is not by confrontation,” he said. “I want to keep writing and keep being an Iranian novelist in Iran.”