The Colonel

'This novel has what it takes to become a strong and irresistible window into Iran' - Die Zeit Die Zeit StartFragment The colonel's problem with his wits was that he had got used toliving in the past and thinking about nothing else. The past had such a hold onhim that he had grown afraid of dealing with what was happening under his nose.This fear of the present and living in the past had become a habit. Perhaps itwas just an instinctive retreat, a defence against events. Iranian author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's The Colonel opens late at night with a knock on the colonel'sdoor. The colonel has already smoked twenty cigarettes, is old andguilt-ridden, and has become weighed down over the years by memories of thesins he has committed and the mistakes he has made. The colonel is told thathis daughter has been killed and he must pay the necessary fees and assist inher burial. Dowlatabadi makes it clear from the outset that The Colonel is a novel of violenceand guilt, concerned with Iran's long struggle against itself while outsideinfluences (primarily the US through the machinations of the CIA) seek to pushthe country in directions favourable to them and not the citizens. As thecolonel travels to bury his daughter the narrative fractures, splitting firstinto two distinct yet commingled sections - the "present" (the 1980s) in whichthe colonel attempts to bury his daughter, and the thoughts of the colonel,which anchor around significant events of the past (including but not limitedto the coups in the 1950s and the wars in the 1970s). But soon the novelfragments further, following the colonel's family members as they, too, engagein and become victims of the relentless violence of Iran's troubled history. The tragedy of our whole country is the same: we are all alienated,strangers in our own land. It's tragic. The odd thing is that we have never gotused to it. Yet, woe betide us if we do. The irony is that, if you really wantto be seen as a good Iranian, and especially if you aspire to high office inthis country, you first have to be a foreigner, someone who wasn't born here atall. On the other hand, if you were born and bred here and try to remain trueto yourself, your country and your people, then alienation is the most lenientpunishment you can expect. At times, The Colonel'sback-and-forth narrative, which shifts from the present to the past and fromcharacter to character, can be difficult to follow, particularly when coupledwith the novel's tight focus on Iranian military and political history, whichis perhaps unfamiliar to many readers. Happily, translator Tom Patterdaleprovides useful and not too intrusive footnotes to explain various culturalreferences, as well as including a reasonably lengthy essay on Dowlatabadi'stime, nation and career. The Colonel avoids- both within and without the narrative - becoming a dressed-up historicalsurvey of Iran, but the cursory introduction is welcome. The narrative itself becomes progressively nightmarish, culminatingin several vicious torture scenes which, Patterdale informs us, were takendirectly from testimonies supplied by people Dowlatabadi knew. The colonelhimself is no stranger to the low menace of Iran's history: he has committedtwo grave mistakes, the first being his refusal to participate in the DhofarRebellion, the second being that he murdered his wife for cheating on him. Bothmistakes have furthered his ostracisation, both professionally and personallyand, it seems, his daughter's murder is perhaps the last straw. He can nolonger function properly in the present and instead mulls over the mistakes he- and Iran - have made of the past. One of the most curious aspects of Dowlatabadi's novel is that,while the CIA and America are mentioned, their role is presented as somethingfar in the distance, important to Iran's recent history but not the entirecause of its problems. Instead, Dowlatabadi places the responsibility of thehope of the early 1950s fading into the violence of the intervening decades asan error to lay at the feet of the Iranians - all the dreams, all the promises,all the lives, all the possibilities - these were broken by Iranians. It is too easy to blameAmerica (or, earlier, the British; or, at times, the Soviets) for the woes thenation has inflicted upon itself, and as long as the young in their outrage andthe old in their calculation continue to blame an external source, then thereal problems will never be fixed and the cycle will continue. Dowlatabadi's novel examines the consequences of revolutions andthe unexpected (and unexpectedly violent) paths they usually take once theeuphoria of the coup has faded. Revolutions have a habit of eating the verypeople who created them, and virtually always devolve into a cycle of killing,violence and secrecy that can last generations. The colonel, while wrapped inhis own guilt, functions as a kind of witness to these horrors, both throughhis own recollections but also through the lives of his children who, asPatterdale's essay informs us, act as stand-ins for the different types ofideologies that arose out of the turmoil of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It isno accident that each of the colonel's children end up dead, just as it is noacciden that even to this day the novel remains unavailable within Iran andunpublished in the original Persian. Dowlatabadi's criticism is sharp,unsparing, and directed against everyone: you are all responsible, seems to be his message. I'm well aware that at every stage of history there have beencrimes against humanity, and they couldn't have happened without humans tocommit them. The crimes that have been visited on my children have beencommitted, and still are being committed, by young people just like them, bypeople stirring up their delusions, giving them delusions of grandeur. So whydo I imagine that people might improve? Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's TheColonel is one long argument to support the idea that a sufficientlybrutalised nation becomes a perpetual device of self-mutilation as onegeneration succeeds the next and the crimes, violence and death continues.There is no ideology or political party sufficiently coherent to withstand thepressure to commit violence in order to remain in power and, in the end, theblood of thousands stains the hands of every Iranian. The Colonel is a powerful and difficult text, brutal both inits fragmented composition and its unflinching examination of the consequencesof power and the ways in which those in power will act to keep it.EndFragment -- Damian Kelleher Damian Kelleher's Blog 20110914 A fable of the Iranian terror Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is best known in Iran for his 10-volume epic Kelidar, which at more than 3000 pages is perhaps for the moment unlikely to feature in any publisher's catalogue. We are, in the meantime, fortunate to have this passionate and informative fable of the Islamic revolution in our hands. The idealistic and relatively modernised "Colonel", a career officer in the Shah's army, has murdered his adulterous wife. Stripped of his rank, he finds himself in the same prison as his eldest son, Amir, a student who belongs to the Iranian Communist Party. Father and son are soon released in the weeks of mayhem following the Shah's departure into exile and Ayatollah Khomeini's return. Everyone's hopes are soon quashed, however, when the new regime outstrips its predecessor's brutality. Public executions follow, the universities are shut down and the new generations are "left struggling like newly-hatched chicks in this fist, which had turned into a vulture's talons". The Colonel is the tale, in the words of its translator, Tom Patterdale, of how "the revolution ate its own children". Four of the colonel's five children are executed or killed in action: three for belonging to various leftist factions, while another is "martyred" in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). No scenes are more telling of this senseless bloodshed than those involving Amir and his former interrogator Khezr Javid, whom Amir hides in his cellar when violent mobs take to the streets looking to lynch their jailers. It is an uncomfortable pairing that Dowlatabadi exploits to portray a society ravaged by a warped morality. For a fable, there is very little allegory about the novel: it is very historically accurate. The character of the Colonel draws on a historical figure, Mohammad Taqi Khan Pesyan (1892-1921), a hero even to current Iranian nationalists. This scrupulous reformer was probably the closest Iran ever got to its own Ataturk. In this novel he is a metaphor for the Iran that might have been. Patterdale is to be commended for his immaculate glossary, which does not omit a single reference in the text to Persian mythology, place-names or historical and political figures. His equally precious afterword informs us that The Colonel has "never appeared in its original language" in Iran. It was first published in Germany, after Dowlatabadi had deemed that decades of tinkering with the manuscript had come to an end. It's about time everyone even remotely interested in Iran read this novel. -- Andre Naffis-Sahely The Independent Newspaper 20111004 The author sets the scene: a pitch-black, rainy night in a small Iranian town. Inside his house, the Colonel is immersed in memories of his wife, of the great patriots of the past, all of them assassinated or executed, of his children, who had joined the different factions of the 1979 revolution.There is a knock on the door. Two young policemen have come to summon the Colonel to collect the body of his youngest daughter and bury her before sunrise. The Islamic Revolution, like every other revolution, is devouring its own children. And whose fault is that?Mahmoud Dowlatabadi does not leave one taboo unbroken in this diatribe against the failures of the Iranian left. ... The story begins with the old colonel roused in the middle of the night to come and deal with his fourteen-year-old daughter's body. As he stumbles around in confusion, guilt and dismay, his actions and interpretations of events show that the ordinary has become extraordinary in Iran, and vice versa. This death of his youngest daughter has taken place under a fundamentalist Islamic regime and yet he is being told by the authorities to bury her in the middle of the night, something we learn much later in the book is against Islamic law. The body should be laid out by women, but this can't be done either. Piecing these elements together, and discovering the betrayal that lies behind her death, however, is no easy task because past and present are muddled in the colonel's thoughts and actions, and the dead from his past come back to life and not (it seems) just in the old man's memories... ... The central theme of this work seems to be that Iran is beyond hope. The rain pours down incessantly, symbolising tears of unquenchable grief, and the (male) characters smoke incessantly, representing self-destructive behaviour. Everyone is at cross-purposes, and families are riven by political conflict. A rare moment when she isn't weeping allows Amir (on the verge of suicide) to confront his sister Farzaneh with her alienation from the family (because her husband is on the political Right, while the other siblings are on variations of the Left)... ... A while ago, round about the time that Iran was labelled part of the 'axis of evil' I saw a documentary about Iran which featured interviews with young people in their twenties. Although necessarily guarded as they spoke to journalists from the West, these English-speaking and well-travelled young people were acutely aware that reforms were needed, but they seemed optimistic. I hope they were right, and that Dowlatabadi is wrong... -- Lisa Hill ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 20111127 Key journalists and experts on Iran gathered in London on 6th September to discuss the difficulties and importance of publishing authors like Mahmoud Dowlatabadi and the role of literature at moments of revolution. This dark book, like many others, continues to be banned from publication in Iran, although it has been translated into English, French and German. Dowlatabadi, with a distinguished career that spans the 80s to the present is self taught and began life working on a farm, he remains one of the most famous realist writers in Iran today. One of those intriguing novels that cover the action of only one day while giving the reader an insight into more than one lifetime, looks at modern Iran and the personal toll politics and history have taken on one man. Surreal and Kafkaesque, the structure of the novel is reminiscent of Hedayat's The Blind Owl and the controversial nature of its critical look at several points in Iranian history: "THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION, LIKE EVERY OTHER REVOLUTION IN HISTORY, IS DEVOURING ITS OWN CHILDREN. AND WHOSE FAULT IS THAT? THIS SHOCKING DIATRIBE AGAINST THE FAILURES OF THE IRANIAN LEFT OVER THE LAST FIFTY YEARS DOES NOT LEAVE ONE TABOO UNBROKEN." " 6 Pillars 20110901 A page-turning panorama of Iranian mental anguish, producing visions and nightmares like dark exotic blossoms. -- A Schader Neue Zurcher Zeitung 20110901 Mahmud Doulatabadi is one of the most preeminent novelists of Iran. I discovered Dowlatabadi * when I was 17. I knew Kelidar ( ) was an important book to read. My younger sister who was always richer than I, spent all of her summer savings to buy this 5-volume novel: the love story of Maral and Gol-Mohammad; in the turbulent history of their tribes of Iran's north east province, Khorasan. I remember living with the book, reading it nonstop for 10 days, hardly eating or sleeping. I was perhaps too young for it then; but I couldn't put it down. Maral reminded me of my own grandmother; and the story taught me about the intricacies of individuality, honor, loyalty, love, passion and the cost of breaking from conformity. I read his other books later, but to date, and to author's admission, Kelidar remains his most "perfect" book! Dolatabadi * is 69, he was born in the village of Dolatabad in Khorasan. Before he became a writer, he earned life from labouring in farming, shoe making, barbering, bicycle repair, herding sheep, slaughter house, print shops, cinema projections--all range of works that are not customary for the "educated" or those with "to-be-educated-to-write" aspirations. His rural experiences set his books apart from the white-glove urban, or aristocratic settings of many of his contemporary literary figures of Iran. He paved his path to literature through theater, starting at the age of 22. His most recent book, Der Colonel, written simultaneously in Persian and German--a story awaiting 25 years to be told--has made it to German publication, and is suffering Persian censorship, thanks to Mr Ahmadinejad's Coup D'etat ... (Dolatabadi has been a vocal critic of Ahmadinejad) To German speakers, I recommend to listen to his interview Dolatabadi with Ilija Trojanow on Arte.TV about Der Colonel. He talks about his...