Walking the line between fiction and non-, this is a kind of meta-memoir, a story about the stories that define us. It’s a story heavy with loss (of home, of his left-behind father, of innocence), light with humor and love (for his mother, the “unstoppable force”), rich in culture and language (and, somehow, never sentimental). The result is a winding series of digressions that takes the reader on a journey as intimate as it is epic, knitting together a tale of Daniel’s youth in Iran, the perilous flight from home with his sister and mother, and their oppressive new beginning as refugees in Oklahoma. In the tradition of 1,001 Nights’ Scheherazade, he gathers up the loose strands of his memory, weaving short personal vignettes into the Persian histories, myths, and legends that are his ancestry. “A patchwork story is the shame of a refugee.” It’s with this refrain that 12-year-old Khosrou, known as Daniel to his skeptical Oklahoman classmates, tells “a version” of his life story.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |