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A review by jessrock
My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad
4.0
I added My Uncle Napoleon to my Amazon wishlist after seeing it mentioned in Reading Lolita in Tehran as one of the author's favorite Iranian novels. The book takes place in Tehran during World War II, during the adolescence of the unnamed male narrator, who has just (at the onset of the story) realized that he is madly in love with his cousin Layli. Professing this love publically would be scandalous not because the two are cousins ("A marriage between cousins is arranged in heaven," the characters quote) but because Layli is promised to another, older cousin, and because the narrator's father and Layli's father are entrenched in a bitter rivalry from across the garden yard their houses share.
The novel is a comedic soap opera, with the family members all out to get each other and planning elaborate actions and reactions behind each other's backs. Layli's father, the eldest and head member of the extended family, admires Napoleon to the point of beginning to equate himself with the man, becoming increasingly delusional about there being English spies everywhere ready to pay him back for his imagined victories over the British. The narrator's father wants to bring Dear Uncle Napoleon down off his high horse, but the narrator and a favorite uncle team up to try to undo everything the father does in order to maintain enough peace between the families that the narrator can go on seeing Layli. Everyone is always making sex jokes, using elaborate and ridiculous euphemisms since they consider it impolite to talk about the sex act or other bodily functions directly.
The book is sweet and funny and enjoyable - excellent train reading fare, and I'd get home and keep on reading it long after the commute was over. It's nothing too substantial and doesn't really require a reading, but I had a good time with it. Apparently it was made into a TV show in the 1970s that was so popular in Iran that it's something of a cultural reference point for anyone living there at that time - I was hoping it would be available in English but it seems there's no such luck. It's a very visual sort of book that I imagine would translate to the screen exceptionally well.
The novel is a comedic soap opera, with the family members all out to get each other and planning elaborate actions and reactions behind each other's backs. Layli's father, the eldest and head member of the extended family, admires Napoleon to the point of beginning to equate himself with the man, becoming increasingly delusional about there being English spies everywhere ready to pay him back for his imagined victories over the British. The narrator's father wants to bring Dear Uncle Napoleon down off his high horse, but the narrator and a favorite uncle team up to try to undo everything the father does in order to maintain enough peace between the families that the narrator can go on seeing Layli. Everyone is always making sex jokes, using elaborate and ridiculous euphemisms since they consider it impolite to talk about the sex act or other bodily functions directly.
The book is sweet and funny and enjoyable - excellent train reading fare, and I'd get home and keep on reading it long after the commute was over. It's nothing too substantial and doesn't really require a reading, but I had a good time with it. Apparently it was made into a TV show in the 1970s that was so popular in Iran that it's something of a cultural reference point for anyone living there at that time - I was hoping it would be available in English but it seems there's no such luck. It's a very visual sort of book that I imagine would translate to the screen exceptionally well.