A thank you to whoever recommended The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer. I enjoyed it—with one reservation, which I'll get to in a minute. The subject matter itself is quite interesting. Isaac Amin, a successful jeweler in Tehran, sees the life he knows vanish during the Iranian revolution in the 1970s, when he is carted off to jail. He is, of course, innocent of the few charges the authorities could "hang on" him. When he claims innocence or lack of knowledge, he is tortured—primarily because he is not giving the answers his captors want to hear.
The story of Septembers is also the effect of Isaac's arrest on the rest of his family—his wife, a thirteen-year-old daughter and an older son already living and going to school in New York. All these characters—and even more—experience lives fraught with danger. And therein lies the problem I had with the book. Something bad is always about to happen, yet the characters manage to avoid or escape the issue. Example: In a scene reminiscent of Doctor Zhivago, Isaac, his wife and daughter go to spend time in their summer home. They arrive, not to find "it all boarded up" as Zhivago does, but it has been sold by the government to another family, the head of which explains to Isaac that he, Isaac, already had a home in Tehran, he didn't need a second one. Then did I, the reader, get a grandiose scene similar to Ralph Richardson pulling a board off his family home and saying, "Damn it all, I'm the people, too"? Nope. Isaac finds a beachfront home for rent, and he and his family stay there. Anticlimactic, to say the least.
I guess the problem, IMHO, is that when a writer uses danger to tease, occasionally the threat has to turn out to be real. Remember that one of the things I liked in the 87th precinct novels was Ed McBain's ability to create a likeable character and then kill him off. Dalia Sofer needs a lesson from Ed McBain.
Bottom line? I'll give it a thumbs up at less than a 90 degree angle. The picture of a modernized country being taken over by religious conservatives was interesting.
