The Blind Owl Paperback – October 12, 2010

An Persian friend reccommended this book to me, and managed to read it all in one sitting. It was such a quick, compelling read, with so much going on that you feel like you are running through a sandstorm. I have NEVER read a description of an insane mind as well written as this. Poe, Lovecraft, and Dostoeyevsky, I would say, have written excellent descriptions of insane minds, but this is by far the best. By the way, Lovecraft and Dostoyevsky are my two favorite authors.The passage where the narrator describes his dream woman as an angel, and describes the beauty of her eyes is definatly the most beautiful passage I have ever read. Likewise, his descriptions of the more gruesome scenes are really quite disgusting.Hedayat really wrote a masterpiece here. I would highly reccomend it to people who enjoy the authors I have previously mentioned. Its a great book, with so many layers, and so many different ways to interpret what's going on. In the end, even I was unable to figure out what the truth of the matter really was. Absolutely fascinating.

Review by Brian H. Appleton, [...] of:The Blind Owl by Sadegh HedayatThe story is like an opium dream in which the reader drifts along with the writer in and out of awake and dreaming with recurring themes and symbols like an intoxicated mind trying to keep hold of its tenuous grasp on reality. There is the blue morning glory flower, the flower-vase of Rhages, kisses with the bitter taste of the green stub end of the cucumber, the smell of champac perfume, the wine bottle with the cobra venom that he can't get rid of like a boomerang, the singing drunken policemen passing by the street below, the bone handled butcher knife that he can't get rid of like a boomerang, the butcher cutting up sheep carcasses, the coughing horses with dead sheep slung over their backs, these images keep recurring in different circumstances like a floating mirage. His imagery is at times stunningly beautiful like his simple description of a row of dark shadowy trees along a road in the night which look like they are all holding hands so as not to fall down on a slippery slope. The rows of strange and menacing looking houses of geometric shapes like cones and prisms that recur as in a dream sequence; if it were made into a film it would be reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal." The hearse driver and the odds and ends man with his head scarf and hideous laughter "of a quality that make the hairs on one's body stand on end," and the narrator himself seem to at times be different people and at other times they are one and the same. In the end we don't know if the wife has committed adultery or not with one or with many or only with the old odds and ends man or if in fact that was really the narrator and that this is all his imagined paranoia. We sense that his frustration, love and hate for his wife is powerfully real and all consuming regardless of the state of her fidelity and in fact he claims that her neglect is what is causing his slow death. The painting on the top of the pen case is of the dark mysterious woman with staring eyes on the other side of a stream holding a blue morning glory flower while the old man with the scarf wrapped around his head and neck squats on the other side laughing hideously. Where the story started to remind me of Edgar Allen Poe is the first time the theme of the drunken policemen singing as they pass by his window in the street makes him think they are coming to get him so we are given a hint that he has either already committed murder or will, even though the strange silent woman on the pen case has mysteriously appeared sitting on his doorsteps and when he lets her into his house, she goes straight to his bed and lays down and dies. We begin to understand that she and his wife are one and the same person but events which chronologically should precede others seem out of order like the way hallucinations induced by drugs seem to interrupt the brain waves like jumbling the letters of the alphabet out of order even if they are still all there. We have no idea in the end if the story took place over a matter of days or months or all in one night like the hauntings by the various ghosts of Christmas of Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."The descriptions of his own thoughts and feelings and his changing body appearance and shadow and facial expressions, his fevers and depressions and the pleasure and power he takes from fear, pain and self torment, is like an ever changing kaleidoscope of one completely living within one's own mind and only marginally in touch with the outside world like the autistic. It is like a river passing along in which the same objects bob underwater only to resurface again and again further up or down the stream like his and his wife's lost childhood playing hide-and-seek along the Suran.His descriptions of dried coagulated blood and decay and murder, dispassionately like a mortician performing autopsy without emotion or like it is not really happening but only imagined so that the reader is never actually sure, keeps us riveted from the beginning of the tale to the end.Again it is reminiscent of Poe's poem "The Beautiful Annabel Lee" and his seemingly unorthodox marriage to his 13 year old cousin and her early demise in real life. The suspense rises and falls palpably like a recurring tide and makes one feel with the author, like a rat stuck on the tread mill of life, coming round full circle again and again but never really going anywhere with only the illusion of linear progress. The story ends as abruptly as it begins, yet resolves with everything falling neatly into place like the toys that come to life when no one is looking, which then freeze the moment a person enters the room. The ease with which the author has populated this dreamscape of existential nausea makes me think it was a struggle with which he was intimately familiar himself and his suicide becomes all the more poignant.

Readers have compared this classic modern Persian novel to the works of Poe's fevered imagination. Its hero is delusional, obsessed, and maybe totally mad. The narrative is dream-like in structure, which is to say layered, circular, and driven by its own demented logic.If that's not enough, the far-from-reliable narrator has fiercely psychotic conflicts regarding women. The author may well be commenting on the deep divisions between men and women in his culture, where attraction is balanced against profound distrust. His narrator is either idealizing women or portraying them as evil incarnate.Meanwhile, there are episodes of black comedy, one involving identical twin men locked in a room with a cobra. And the cycling and recycling of nightmarish images, each as if occurring for the first time, offers an ironic motif of déjà vu. Recommended to lovers of the surreal who enjoy puzzling over the meanings of dreams, whether personal or effusions of the collective unconscious.

I enjoy Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories of madness and the macabre, and this Iranian classic promised to be like one of those on steroids (in a Persian setting, of course). It delivered convincingly on the madness as our opium-addicted narrator spirals ever deeper into his insanity. We see him struggling with (or giving in to) obsession, loss of identity, sexual frustration, alienation, paranoia, homicidal urges, suicidality, and more. And, I’m sure that people more proficient at literary analysis than I will also find layers of allegory and other juicy things to (over)analyze.The story of our narrator's pathetic life slowly unfolds throughout the course of the story. At least it sort of does…he’s so spectacularly unstable that it’s pretty hard to distinguish fact from delusion. I can definitely see how this book gained its reputation as a modern classic with its exploration of dark psychology and lyrical prose.That said, I didn’t especially enjoy the book. It is incredibly dark (urban legend has it that many readers have committed suicide), and a lot of the sexual (and other bodily function) stuff was just kind of gross. If you’re into psychological horror this may be right up your alley, but it was a bit much for me.

I haven't really read it all, but as much I have, it's a beautiful book to which you can totally relate. I'd recommend it to literally all age types.

A dark, but elegantly written novella, a perfect miniature in modernist style. Influences of Kafka, Sartre, Nietzsche, Chekhov and Tolstoy are noticeable, but the work retains its unmistakable uniqueness. Recommended.

This ain't an easy read. After few pages the reader is transported into the mind of the narrator. But how many narrators are in there?! Perhaps it is the same person talking in multiple voices, or perhaps not. One never knows for sure. This is a psychologically deranged work of art.

I liked reading the book although I cannot say that it was my best read. It is quite dark and depressive, at some parts I was even disgusted by the events: though it can say that the writer completed his task in reaching the reader's emotions. No explanation nor hints on what happened and why always keeps you wondering, wanting to read and find and answer. I guess I will need to read it again to completely comprehend the beauty of this book.

a ride on a trip this book is. excellent.