{"id":20370,"date":"2022-11-04T22:45:18","date_gmt":"2022-11-04T22:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/shining-dead-by-mazdak-shafieian-reviews-and-recommendations\/"},"modified":"2022-11-04T22:45:19","modified_gmt":"2022-11-04T22:45:19","slug":"shining-dead-by-mazdak-shafieian-reviews-and-recommendations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/shining-dead-by-mazdak-shafieian-reviews-and-recommendations\/","title":{"rendered":"“Shining dead” by Mazdak Shafieian – Reviews and recommendations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Politically speaking, we can safely say that Mazdak Shafieian’s parents were on the wrong side at the wrong time. Being a communist in a small town in the west of Iran in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war around 1987 was downright dangerous. The parents lost their jobs in connection with the Islamization of the university. The uncle, who is an actor, was not in high demand either. His aunt disappeared in a way that brings to mind Mahsa Amini. She died in the custody of the morality police in September. That event was the trigger for today’s uprising in Iran. Rusty cars and airplane alarms Shafieian calls his story in “Shining dead” a work of memory. It is about piecing together experiences he had as a seven-year-old. The fruits of the labor are portioned out in condensed sections. I get the experience of being inside Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic. We bump along in the back seat of rusted cars with this small family who constantly have to look for new apartments. We are in the classroom when the airplane alarm goes off and the students try to get away from the chemical bombs of Saddam Hussein. We join a Kafkaesque appeals body, where the parents try to get an explanation as to why they lost their jobs. It is all told from a present-day level, where Shafieian wanders around Oslo as an adult. Listen to the review of “Shining dead” in “Open book: The critics”: War games with matches Fascinated, I sit and study what is found of images and information in the individual sections. Children play war games with matches, build ruined cities. In another section, the books appear, forbidden literature that the father must either burn or place with a sleazy relative who sells them on. This very old Persian kingdom appears as an ancient written culture that the new rulers are about to destroy. The story is handed down through the parents’ stories and nighttime stories to the seven-year-old and his sister, and alleviates the war trauma they have been exposed to. Sobert Bokm\u00e5l The language in the novel is a chapter in itself. There is absolutely nothing here of the voracious desire to highlight a diversity of sociolects and languages, as we have seen in recent years with other authors with a multicultural background. Shafieian writes a sober Bokm\u00e5l. It is rich in imagery, as it tends to be when a poet debuts as a novelist. But it is all based on the desire to find a valid language for the child’s point of view. Then it cannot be made unnecessarily complicated. Then it must be said simply: Missing the trip to Norway But how did this family end up in Norway? We are being cheated of that story. Is it the case that that journey has been told enough times \u2013 by others? Is there nothing more to add? The actual flight north from Iran (and life afterwards) is described by the country’s parliamentary president Masud Gharahkhani in his new autobiography “Norway in my heart. From refugee to president of the Storting”. COMPLEMENTARY: Parliament Speaker Masud Gharahkhani’s autobiography complements Mazdak Shafieian’s account. Photo: Kristoffer Lenes \/ news We are thus dealing with two different accounts that complement each other, not least because they use different linguistic tools. Garahkhani precisely describes Saddam Hussein’s chemical bombs from an adult’s perspective within the framework of a politician’s biography. Shafieian hunts for the experience on the ground, for what he experienced as a child, which he carries with him as an adult. The novel ends in Khomeini’s Iran – where over thirty years later the population still has to endure the same repression, and the same summary liquidations. It is also possible that there will be more. There is something about the way this book is written – thought-provoking and thrilling – that makes it possible to imagine a sequel. Access behind the walls “Shining Dead” gives a unique feeling of gaining privileged access to a society and a time that has passed. I have only seen something similar once earlier this year. It was then that I read the novel “Kairos” by the German Jenny Erpenbeck. There we also met people in a dictatorship, just before the whole system collapsed. Mazdak Shafieian opens the door wide to the revolt against the ayatollahs that will come, yes, that is already underway. news reviews Photo: Gyldendal Title: “Shining dead” Author: Mazdak Shafieian Genre: Novel Publisher: Gyldendal Number of pages: 209 Date: Autumn 2022 Hi! I read and review literature in news. Please also read my review of “Kairos” by Jenny Erpenbeck, “Etterliv” by Abdulrazak Gurnah or Franz Kafka’s “The Process” translated by Jon Fosse. More Iran Culture:
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Politically speaking, we can safely say that Mazdak Shafieian’s parents were on the wrong side at the wrong time. Being a communist in a small town in the west of Iran in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war around 1987 was downright dangerous. The parents lost their jobs in connection with the Islamization of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20371,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[306,9104,225,224,9105,9103],"class_list":["post-20370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-dead","tag-mazdak","tag-recommendations","tag-reviews","tag-shafieian","tag-shining"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}