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Women Without Men: A Novel Of Modern Iran (2004)

Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran (2004)

Book Info

Genre
Rating
3.57 of 5 Votes: 4
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ISBN
1558614524 (ISBN13: 9781558614529)
Language
English
Publisher
the feminist press at cuny

About book Women Without Men: A Novel Of Modern Iran (2004)

قصه زنهاییست که در هر بخش به طور جداگانه بخش تلخی از زندگیشان را میخوانیممهدختی که در باغ کرج درخت میشودفائزه ای که عاشق امیر است و با زن برادرش رقابت آشپزی دارد.مونس پیر دختر ساده ای که دوبار میمیرد و زنده میشود و قدرت خواندن ذهنها را دارد.فاحشه ای که مردان همبسترش را بی سر میدید.فرخ لقای میانسال زیبا که شوهرش را غیر عمد میکشد.همه اینها در آخر به کرج میروندکه چه؟ که سرنوشتشان نه مثل هم که در کنار هم رقم بخورد؟خانم پارسی پور به زن از چند بعد و در قالب چند زندگی نگاه میکند عریانش میکند تفسیرش میکند. چنان بی طرف که تمام ابعاد انسانی و غیر انسانی آنها را درک میکنی. تمام آن احساسهای لطیف و گاه خشن را زیر پوستت حس میکنی. گاهی مونسی و گاهی فائزه. گاهی زرین کلاه و گاهی فرخ لقا. گاهی هم مثل مهدخت میخواهی چیزی باشی ورای آنچه هستی چیزی که کسی قادر به بودنش نیست. شاید بخواهی مثل یک درخت بارور باشی. یا مثل بلور غرق نور. چیزی که در کتاب برایم روشن مانده طنز تلخش است که هنوز نیشم میزند.قسمتی از کتاب را برایتان مینویسم همانجایی که فائزه و مونس در راه آمدن به کرج مورد تجاوز قرار گرفتند و فائزه گریه میکند و میگوید:من بیچاره باکره بودم.من بالاخره میخواهم شوهر کنم. حالا با این بی آبرویی چه کنم و چه خاکی بر سرم ریزم. مونس در جوابش میگوید: آخر فائزه جان منهم باکره بودم.خوب حالا بدرک.ما یک وقت باکره بودیم. حالا دیگر نیستیم. اینکه غم ندارد.و در جایی دیگر مونس به فرخ لقا در توجیه سفرش میگوید:الان دوره ای نیست که زن تنها به سفر رود.یا باید نامرئی شود یا باید چشمش کور در خانه بماند.اما بدبختی من دیگر نمیتوانم در خانه بمانم.با اینحال چون زن هستم بالاخره باید در خانه بمانم.منتهی شاید بشود یک مقداری جلو بروم بعد بچپم توی یک خانه.دوباره مقداری بروم باز بچپم توی یک خانه دیگر.همینطوری شاید بتوانم به سبک لاکپشت دنیا را گشت بزنم...فایل پی دی افش در اکثر سایتها هست. حتما بخوانید.

This review first appeared on the Magic Realism Books blog - http://magic-realism-books.blogspot.comWhat the Goodreads description does not say is just how beautiful this novella is. Women Without Men does tackle the issues facing Iranian women, but it does so in a magical and poetic way. Magic realism is used to make bearable and visible the oppression these women face and to give voice to their dreams. I am not surprised this book so shocked the Iranian establishment. We see behind the veil into the lives, hopes and disappointments of the five woman. One is murdered by her brother for dishonouring the family, although all she did was to leave the family home for a few days. She rises from the dead, able to read the thoughts of those around her. Another, in her desire and need to be loved by a man, acts as an accomplice to the murderer only to be betrayed by him. One turns into a tree in order to protect her virginity while expressing her sexual desire. Another, a prostitute, leaves the brothel when she starts seeing men as having no heads. The fifth is a beautiful wife, who kills her controlling husband by accident, and buys the garden that becomes the refuge for the other women and herself. Women's sexuality, its suppression and indeed the denial of its existence by the patriarchal Iranian society is at the heart of the book. Parsipur shows that this denial is destructive of the relationship between men and women. Men are shown to suffer by their failure to see the truth about women. For example, the murderer marries a girl who is outwardly everything a good Iranian girl should be: very beautiful, soft and quiet, modest, shy, diligent, hard-working, dignified, chaste, and neat. She wears a chador, always looks down when she is in the street and blushes constantly. But he has been deceived. Interestingly there is a sixth occupant of the garden - a man known only as the Good Gardener. His behaviour is shown in contrast to that of other men. He is a nurturer and lover of women. He enables the tree to bear fruit and marries the former prostitute and fathers a child by her, but the child is not a baby but a lily. The garden he creates changes the women in different ways; not all are magically transformed, two simply are able to reconsider and reset their relationship with men. A key point is that none of the women, including the tree, stay in the garden once it has worked its magic. The long-term answer is not for women to live separate from the man's world. I recommend this book to you. It may be short but it holds far more than many books four times its length.

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„Pe lângă faptul că te trezești într-un tablou diferit de tot ceea ce ai citit până acum despre lumea femeilor care nu au dreptul la propria viață, mi se pare interesantă ”tehnica” (dacă poate fi numită așa) celor 1001 de nopți ale Șeherezadei, adică împletirea unui fir care va da naștere unui alt fir și tot așa. Nu numai că Șeherezada noastră nu tace la ivirea zorilor, ci chiar se revoltă și îndrăznește să stârnească furia sultanului pentru că nu are de gând să-i mai îndeplinească vreo poruncă. Putem numi romanul un mijloc de a se răscula împotriva tradițiilor iraniene vizavi de modul în care e tratată femeia în societate și în familie.”de la sursă: Shahrnush Parsipur – Femei fără bărbați – SemneBune http://semnebune.ro/2014/shahrnush-pa...
—Semnebune

Spicuiri din recenzia finala care se gaseste pe blogul meu ..................................Mi-a plăcut în mod deosebit joaca lui Parsipur cu elemente specifice realismului magic. Grădina doamnei Farrokhlaghá mi-a adus aminte de Rushdie și a sa Seducătoare din Florența. Este adevărat că Parsipur nu ajunge la nivelul lui Rushdie, dar are potențial. Felul în care aranjează destinele personajelor, așezarea deznodământului într-un plan fantastic este, categoric, punctul forte al volumului. Decizia de a insera detalii din cultura persană în evenimentele care duc personajele spre soluționarea intrigii oferă cititorului indicii cu privire la mesajul subliminal pe care Parsipur vrea să-l transmită....................................
—Razvan Zamfirescu

Oh great, I get to be a book club naysayer for the third time out of three, on the second book in a row that I voted for out of ten total potentials. I'm averaging 2.666 on club-related ratings here, which incidentally makes me happy because 666, but primarily makes me feel like Asshole McChoosy-pants. I hope the candidates I put forward all end up middling-to-sucky, or I'm sure going to look like a real taste snob. I swear I am not blindly obstinate. I double-swear I like books. Much.The truth is that I was just really disappointed, so harshness in the face of that disappointment is a definite possibility. High hopes, I hads. We were attacking the sexual politics of theocracies! We were building an egalitarian world between worlds where fates converged and reformed into some mushroom-trippy Utopia! We were imbuing pressing social issues with reshaping flecks of surrealistic imagery! We were overzealously throwing around exclamation points! And yeah, all of those things are true (except the !'s, that was just me), but it was so heavy-handed in all regards that it didn't work in almost any regard. For me.Basically, this is like magical realism play-doh mixed with feminist screed play-doh, but not well enough to make a new and interesting color; more like when you lazily just mush the contents of the different tubs together and knead them, meh, a little bit, then suddenly get bored and go have a sandwich, dropping the half-reformed glob on the ground to dry out and get eaten by some kid with pica. Wow, I took that way too far, much like this book does with all its metaphors. Next thing you know my play-doh comparison will turn into a tree, and I'll have to get pregnant so I can feed it my breastmilk. Don't ask. Worse, it reads like it was translated by Ben Stein's larynx. They went to the gar-den. It was a lo-ve-ly gar-den. In the gar-den there was a gar-de-ner who gard-ened. Ran-dom mys-ti-cal crea-ture. Everything is so matter-of-fact, so explain-y that the reading voice in my head involuntarily ran itself through a vocoder and slapped on some off-kilter beat. And I should not be hearing electronica in my head when I am contemplating terrible things like forceful religious indoctrination, socioeconomic oppression, and sexual violence/servitude.I feel bad saying all this because it was phenomenally brave of Shahrnush Parsipur to even write, let alone publish this book in Iran in the first place, but book report honesty is the best policy. I think. I hope. I could chalk a lot of my complaints up to translation issues, and some of the more mystical imagery in this would make for very lovely paintings or eency-weency picture-book parables. Tacked all together, though, it just doesn't hold. I would very much like to see the film based on it, though, and if anyone else has, please do tell. Maybe we'll watch it at book club. In which I am the worst member ever.
—Paquita Maria Sanchez

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