The Book of Fate

The novel opens with a friendship: «The things my friend Parvaneh did always surprised me.» Parvaneh talks loudly in the street, looks in shop windows, calls Massoumeh by name from across the road — for a girl just arrived from Qom, who had to promise her father to behave in order to go to school without a chador, this is almost a scandal. These first pages give the key to the whole book: Massoumeh looks at the world through two windows — her family's, which says «shameful», and Parvaneh's, which asks «why?».

Saniee's greatest achievement is the narrator's voice. Massoumeh neither exaggerates events nor presents herself as a heroine; she is a fifteen-year-old who confuses a Chevrolet with a Fiat, secretly loves Vigen's voice on the radio and writes Saiid's name in her poetry notebook in an alphabet she invented. The family portrait is drawn with the same precision: the father, the only understanding person; the grandmother who says «a girl is someone else's property»; the mother who covers up her son's drinking as «toothache»; pious Mahmoud; and Ahmad, who dropped out of school and cannot bear his sister studying.

The love story is almost wordless. For months Massoumeh and Saiid, the student at the pharmacy, only exchange glances; the first «hello» becomes an event, a dropped sewing ruler a turning point. The author does not make this innocence ridiculous — on the contrary, she makes its weight felt. Because the reader knows what Massoumeh does not: in this world, a few letters are enough to change a girl's entire life.

When the letters are found, the novel suddenly hardens. Her younger brother Ali pulls her satchel from under the blanket, Ahmad seizes the letters like «the greatest prize in the world», and her father walks out without a word, without even taking his coat — Massoumeh understands what it means: her father has left her in the hands of the others. The violence is written in detail but without sensationalism; the author's aim is not to shock but to show how a family can unite against its own daughter in the name of «honour».

The bitterest irony comes in the marriage-market section. Massoumeh is «put up for sale», suitors come and go, and finally the neighbour Parvin finds a «gentleman, well educated» candidate: Hamid Soltani. The groom does not even appear before the wedding; his mother is in a hurry because she wants to «tie him down» before leaving for the Hajj. Massoumeh later realises that he too is a victim of coercion — Hamid has another life, another «cause».

Here the novel takes an unexpected turn. «The stranger» is not what Massoumeh feared: he does not touch her, does not even know her name, but tells her «going to school is your right; I am not your jailer». Massoumeh enrols in night school, and for the first time «a light as bright as the sun» enters her life. Yet Saniee does not make this freedom simple either: Hamid's revolutionary friends mock Massoumeh's prayers, and her world is again squeezed between other people's ideologies. So the novel does not build a «pious family bad, modern man good» scheme — in both worlds the woman struggles to have her own say.

As a weakness, the language is at times too plain and explanatory; some dialogue edges towards melodrama, and secondary characters (Parvin, for example) remain somewhat stock types. The Turkish translation we read flows well and explains Iranian cultural terms (korsi, chador, «Hafez divination») in footnotes. But by the end of the first 150 pages Massoumeh's fate is so gripping that these flaws fade into the background.

• A chronological first-person story told in the narrator's own plain language
• A list of characters and places at the start of the book
• Translator's and editor's notes for terms from Iranian daily life