Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

On Literature and Worldliness: A Conversation with Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

• POSTED, 2014

March 16, 2014

A guest post by Amirhossein Vafa, a doctoral student of Comparative Literature at the University of Sheffield.

“Some prizes are important, and some prizes are just not to be trusted,” says an editor at the esteemed Melville House, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s publisher in the United States, in reference to the Iranian author’s recent Jan Michalski Prize. The editor boasts that unlike the Nobel Prize for Literature, for which Dowlatabadi has been considered a number of times, Jan Michalski is not the sort of honor for which “you have to go to Stockholm and see a princess.”

A Review of The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

 

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

A Review of The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Matt McGregor

Translated from the Persian by Tom Patterdale

(Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012)

In 1953, the CIA arrested the civilian Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq, and reinstated Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Mossadeq, a democrat who had nationalized the oil industry, was thrown into solitary confinement for three years. He spent the rest of his life under permanent house arrest. The Americans, with the help of the Israelis, proceeded to set up a secret police service—which would soon include expert torturers—to suppress Iranian dissent. This, along with the routine ignominy of being a client state, was used by many dissidents, including Ayatollah Khomeini, to stoke the embers of revolution.