Reviewed by Bill Marx

Before talking about the artful complexity in The Blind Owl or the satiric playfulness in The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, attention must be paid, especially during the Halloween season, to their memorable images of horror, from the macabre hallucinogenic visions that bedevil the narrators in Saghegh Hedayat’s haunting tale of mental meltdown to the waves of blood that surge through Kim Sok-pom’s disturbing send-up (?) of the tall tale, an exploration of the “living dead” anchored in the real-life brutality exercised by the South Korean government on an armed peasant uprising in the island of Cheju-do in 1948. Make no mistake about it – both books are more than a little scary, mainly because they bottle up Gothic energies rather than let them run wild.


In her introduction to The Blind Owl, contemporary novelist Prorochista Khakpour pays homage to the power of Hedayat’s novel, a cornerstone of contemporary Iranian literature that endures (since its serialization in 1941–1942) as both a critical and popular success, despite periodic censorship in Hedayat’s homeland. As a child, Khakpour wanted to read it badly, but her Iranian father refused to have it in the house, insisting that he would see to it that “she never got her hands on it …” because “it had caused many suicides in Iran after it was published. …. And, well, if you must know, the author also committed suicide.” Hedayat gassed himself to death in 1951; his masterpiece reflects a sensibility that doesn’t rebel against the solace of religion so much as finds it purely of aesthetic interest


Of course, when Khakpour became older she read the dangerous book. Surprisingly, given the build-up, The Blind Owl not only met her expectations but exceeded them. Not that the novel made her suicidal, though she found it disturbing. She saw that Hedayat treats madness with the wizardly acuity and finesse of Edgar Allan Poe. Khakpour mentions Franz Kafka as another influence on the book, but for me the book melds many of Poe’s central motifs – solipsism edging into dementia, the decomposition of mind and body, the perverse attraction of self-destruction – with modernist techniques. The result is an intricate version of “A Tell Tale Heart” that’s set in a hall of mirrors. Heydayat is the real missing artistic link, rather than the ghastly American H.P. Lovecraft, between Poe and the sophisticated psychological horror of today.

(Continue reading ...)