That’s something Pezeshkzad said came even from birth in his family. “In Iran, for example, as Pezeshkzad has mentioned elsewhere, this attitude is not limited to ‘common’ people but is in fact more prevalent among the so-called political and intellectual elite.” “Its protagonist is a small-minded and incompetent personality who blames his failures and his own insignificance on an all-powerful entity, thereby making himself significant and indispensable. “Although the book is not political, it is politically subversive, targeting a certain mentality and attitude,” wrote author Azar Nafisi in 2006. That paranoia bleeds into modern Iran, where its theocracy now finds itself targeted in attacks over its accelerating nuclear program but also has the tendency to blame all its woes on conspirators abroad. In 1953, a CIA- and British-backed coup cemented the shah’s power and overthrew the country’s elected prime minister.īut even before the modern era, weaker Persian dynasties found themselves subsumed by powerful foreign powers. His young son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, took the throne. As Persia formally became Iran, it became the target of world powers.įirst, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran in 1941 and deposed Shah Reza Pahlavi, worried about his overtures to Adolf Hitler in Germany. The narrator loves Uncle Napoleon’s daughter, his cousin, but ultimately never marries her.īut the story does more to explain the mindset of Iranians, who in a generation found themselves dragged from a nearly feudal, rural lifestyle into the modern era of cityscapes. The late essayist Christopher Hitchens once referred to the novel as “a love story unfolded in a bildungsroman and wrapped in a conspiracy theory” - using a $10 word for a coming-of-age tale. Several live in a compound with a vast garden, where the story takes place. In “My Uncle Napoleon,” he focuses on an aristocratic family from the Qajar dynasty, which had ruled Persia for over 100 years. “My sincere condolences and sadness at the passing of one of Iran’s great literary figures - Iraj Pezeshkzad - whose subtle yet powerful satire is an enduring window onto Iranian culture,” Simon Shercliff wrote on Twitter.īorn in Tehran in the late 1920s, Pezeshkzad came of age at the start of Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty. Iranian state media did not report on his death, though the British ambassador to Iran offered his sympathy. Foreign-based Farsi-language television channels also reported his death. No cause of death was immediately offered. Iran’s semiofficial ISNA news agency quoted Davood Mosaei, who published Pezeshkzad’s books, as confirming his death on Wednesday. “When you see her, it’s like a bakery oven is lit in your heart.” “When you don’t see her, it’s like your heart is frozen,” says the servant, portrayed in a softly lit basement scene in the series by famed actor Parviz Fannizadeh. The same goes for passages about the power of love, as described in one scene by Uncle Napoleon’s long-suffering servant, Mash Ghasem. Pezeshkzad’s words and turns of phrase from the novel still litter Iranian culture today, including raunchy references to “San Francisco” as an innuendo for sexual liaisons. Pezeshkzad himself would ultimately land in Los Angeles, part of an emigre society of Iranians still there that see the California city jokingly referred to as “Tehrangeles” even today. The fervor of the 1979 Islamic Revolution saw the book banned and the series never aired again on Iranian state television. The travails of Uncle Napoleon, whose delusions have him seeing Britain’s hand in the troubles plaguing the waning days of his aristocratic family during World War II, became one of the most-beloved television serials ever in Iran when it aired in 1976. TEHRAN: Iraj Pezeshkzad, an Iranian author whose bestselling comic novel, “My Uncle Napoleon,” lampooned Persian culture’s self-aggrandizing and paranoid behavior as the country entered the modern era, has died.
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