Recent Reads

Married to a Stranger, by Nahid Rachlin

I read this because Rachlin wrote a blurb for a friend's book, and because that friend seemed to have regarded her work highly enough to include her work in an anthology and in her writing classes.

I can see some reasons why Rachlin's novel would have appealed to S. The setting in pre-revolutionary Iran and the pervasive concern with family relationships and women's status in marriage and in the society as a whole also appear in S.'s work.

However, I never really felt the kind of direct connection that I felt with S.'s descriptions of similar situations, or with graphic novels such as Maryam Satrapi's Persepolis. The story Rachlin tells is interesting enough, but the prose and the characters' emotions, with one or two exceptions, seem rather flat. Perhaps this is deliberate on the author's part, an attempt to replicate the psychological repression that comes from living in a society such as she describes.

It may also be that my lack of personal experience with the milieu of the story makes me partially deaf to the story's emotional tones and undertones. Perhaps this is further proof that one can never quite fully understand how another person perceives the world, no matter how much one wishes to do so.