Policemen knocking on the door in the middle of the night have summoned an old Iranian colonel to bury his executed 14-year-old daughter. Two of the colonel's sons have already been killed, one in the 1979 revolution, one in the war against Iraq. His eldest son, Amir, released from prison a year ago, is hiding in the basement, having lost faith in everything he ever believed. Hiding with him is a brutal man with a gun in his shoulder holster, a former torturer and secret policeman. To complicate matters, the colonel has murdered his wife.
Dowlatabadi's characters struggle to live in a hostile, paranoid world where people have lost their dignity and all sense of self-worth, constantly making sure everyone considers them beyond suspicion. Their story unfolds in an atmosphere of perpetual fear and insecurity.
The reader, like the grieving old colonel, is soon no longer sure what is really happening, what is a flashback and what is an hallucination. Family members are swept away in a procession of coffins carried on the shoulders of a wailing throng. The baffling ending includes a talking cat, a suicide and a poem about severed heads. Iranian readers would know what to make of all this, and might be deeply moved. A Western reader will be left wondering just exactly why the colonel felt justified in murdering his wife. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle