Full Reviews of My Uncle Napoleon

The Atlantic Monthly (July 1996)

If one came upon this novel with none of the prefatory information provided by Dick Davis, one would be amazed that such a giddily uproarious mixture of farce and slapstick could be published in dourly pious Iran. The explanation is simple. It was published in the days of the Shah, was enormously popular, became a great success as a television series, and continues to be widely and happily read. Mr. Davis compares it to P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster stories and to Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a fantastic, satirical exaggeration of social circumstances that do exist. The nameless teenage narrator is, like the rest of his extended family, afflicted by the self-appointed patriarch known privately as Dear Uncle Napoleon. The old boy is a devoted admirer of Bonaparte and has come to imagine that he himself is a formidable enemy of the British, who are bent on revenge against him for activities that actually amounted to no more than firing "a few bullets at a couple of footloose bandits during Mohammad Ali Shah's reign." Disrespect for Uncle's delusions sets off a family row of stupendous intricacy and absurdity. It begins with social status, water supplies, small brawls, the police, money, a mouse, and a sweetbrier bush-and proceeds into chaos. The novel is funny in an uninhibited, larger than-life style seldom practiced today but readers with no memory of Iranian history before the Second World War will do well to consult the glossary before embarking on the text, for Uncle Napoleon's paranoia does have a connection, however feeble, with reality.
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The Baltimore Sun (July 21, 1996)

It's not every month that a masterpiece of contemporary world fiction becomes available to readers of English. This July, though, readers get a rare treat with the publication of My Uncle Napoleon, a tale of family life in Iran in the 1930s written by Iraj Pezeshkzad and translated from the original Persian by Dick Davis.

My Uncle Napoleon is a family saga, assembling types whose appeal lies in their familiarity -- the naive young lovers, cagey servant, choleric deceived wife -- touched with just enough individuality to make them memorable.

The story, first published in the pre-Islamic Revolution days of the 1970s, was made into a popular TV miniseries. It is so surely told, so funny, true, and ultimately heart-rending, it's absolutely clear why My Uncle Napoleon is loved in its homeland.

For an American reader, there is just enough exoticism to demand a dinner or two in a suitably foreign restaurant. The one off-note is the title character's fierce anti-English political convictions.

The crusty paterfamilias who reveres England's great military adversary is mockingly called "Napoleon" after his idol; troublingly his anti-British sentiment takes the form of looking on Adolf Hitler as a spiritual ally. In a helpful preface, translator Davis traces the roots of Persian resentment of the English and it's worth making the leap to accept a truly alien perspective -- especially since the unnamed narrator, the book's protagonist clearly doesn't share his uncle's opinion of Hitler. Return to top of page

CHOICE (January 1997)

Originally published in Persian in the late 1960s, this novel quickly became an all time best-seller in Iran. It was made into an extremely popular television series in the 1970s and continues to be read by Persians in all walks of life. The basis of the plot is a love story, but what makes the novel so appealing to Persians, and to Westerners, is its satirical view of Persian's manners and attitudes, particularly their tendency to see foreign (mostly British) conspiracies behind local events. The farcical plot dashes along at a rapid pace and there is never a dull stretch. In this English version, much of the reader's enjoyment comes from the outstanding quality of the translation. Davis captures the nuances of the original and never allows the Persian to shine through his English. There is an informative introduction to help orient the reader, a list of the principal characters, and a useful glossary of terms. This novel nicely complements James Morier's comic The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (originally written in 1824), the Persian translation of which was very popular in Iran, and together they present a good-humored picture of Persians and their ways. All collections. Return to top of page

The Christian Science Monitor (February 2, 1997)

First published in 1970 in the author's native Iran, where it was subsequently made into a very popular television series, Iraj Pezeshkzad's comic novel, "My Uncle Napoleon," follows the farcical misadventures, feuds, romances, and rivalries of an upper-class extended Iranian family in Tehran. The narrator is an innocent lad of 13 when the story begins.

The unnamed adolescent boy has fallen in love with his pretty cousin Layli. Unfortunately for him, Layli is the daughter of his wildly overbearing, irascible, and suspicious Uncle Napoleon, who plans to marry her off to another of her cousins, an overeducated fool who is certainly unworthy of so lovely a wife. The fool's father is Uncle Napoleon's brother.

Whereas our nice young hero's father, who married Uncle Napoleon's sister, is not one of Uncle's favorite people. He (quite rightly) considers Uncle Napoleon a pompous windbag and takes every opportunity he can get to poke fun at his countless foibles.

Uncle Napoleon's name, of course, is not really Napoleon: This is just what his disrespectful relatives call him behind his back on account of his hero worship of the famous French emperor. Uncle Napoleon's vainglorious, untruthful tales of his own past military exploits bear an uncanny-resemblance to the battles fought by the French general.

Insofar as the members of Uncle Napoleon's extended family all reside in the same large compound made up of several homes and gardens, opportunities for mischief, mayhem, and other carryings-on are abundant among this set of easily recognizable character types.

There's Mash Qasem, Uncle Napoleon's loyal manservant, who flatters the master's gargantuan ego, but also tries to keep peace within the family.

There's a resident gossip, who spreads rumors that keep disturbing family peace. And there's enough hanky-panky going on to keep even the most avid rumormonger busy: errant husbands, straying wives, and angry spouses threatening revenge with kitchen knives.

Later, with the World War II going on in the distant background, there's a whiff of espionage - at least in the overactive imagination of Uncle Napoleon, who becomes so paranoid about the British that he writes a letter to Hitler, begging to be taken under his protective wing.

Among the few sane voices (along with Mash Qasem) is the witty, cynical ladies' man Asadollah Mirza, who comments wryly on the nutty proceedings and tries to give the lovelorn young narrator some practical tips about romance.

In his preface, the book's translator, Dick Davis, an English-born and educated associate professor of Persian at Ohio State University, suggests readers can gain a more balanced impression of Iran from perusing this novel, which looks at life from the kind of humorous perspective few Westerners may associate with the current regime in that country.

Life in the lunatic household of Uncle Napoleon, however, does not sound all that much more inviting than life in a fundamentalist theocracy! Davis aptly reminds us that Pezeshkzad's comic characters and situations are not realistic portraits and bear about the same relation to ordinary Iranians as P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster bear to ordinary Englishmen.

By the novel's end, the narrator is a grown man. It is now 1979 and many comic adventures later. For many readers, I suspect 500 pages may be a little long for a farce. Return to top of page

Cleveland Plain Dealer (July 14, 1996)

"Funny" and "Iran" are not words easily put together. The last and unlamented shah was no barrel of laughs and his theocratic heirs have not lightened the mood with their visuals of hacked-off hands and the Fountain of the Blood of Martyrs.

But Iraj Pezeshkzad could change all that. The American publication at last of his hilarious 1970 novel, "My Uncle Napoleon," may do more to improve U.S.-Iranian relations than a generation of shuttle diplomats and national apologies.

Comedy, as Steve Martin once remarked, is not "pretty." Nor is it usually very complex or sophisticated. Anyone expecting drawing-room aphorisms or Shawian wit will be acutely disappointed with Pezeshkzad's comic masterpiece. His avenue is strictly knockabout family farce, and readers who like it lined with coarse, peasantstyle humor will find it the sunniest side of the street, indeed. Think of the late Giovanni Guareschi's sweetly naive Don Camillo stories as rewritten by Rabelais and set in Iran and you begin to get the picture.

Both Pezeshkzad's publisher and his skillful translator, Professor Dick Davis of Ohio State University, have compared Pezeshkzad to P.G. Wodehouse, and it is easy to see why. Although Wodehouse eschewed the lower common denominator staples of "My Uncle Napoleon's" humor --cuckoldry, flatulence, adultery, impotence, endless screaming arguments and not infrequent physical altercations -- Pezeshkzad's deft employment of a handful of lovable characters in repetitive dialogue and situations is similarly likely to provoke helpless mirth in susceptible readers.

Instead of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves in Edwardian England, though, we have Uncle Napoleon, the wonderfully deluded, bullying patriarch of a dotty Tehran clan and his superlatively comic servant, the interminable voluble Mash Qasem. The petty family conflicts that devolve around this fall down-funny duo should propel Pezeshkzad to world status as a comic artist.

The time is the early 1940s -- as Iran becomes the helpless cat's-paw of the Allied and Axis powers -- and the place is Uncle Napoleon's extended family compound in Tehran. As told by an unnamed nephew of Uncle Napoleon, the novel's main business concerns the narrator's infatuation with his uncle's daughter, Layli. All plots and subplots defer to this doomed love affair, but the cumulatively overpowering comedy comes from this novel's potent principal characterizations. Uncle Napoleon, so-called (behind his back) because of his admiration of the French emperor, is in fact a paranoid, pathetic bully; his lies about his patriotic war record inadequately mask his cringing and irrational fear of malevolent British interference and interest in his smallest affairs. Mash Qasem is a suitable Everyman, comic foil and abettor of all of his master's predictable but comically satisfying whims.

The supporting cast more than holds its own in this cunningly wrought, farcical triumph. (A television series based on the novel was a nationwide Iranian hit during the 1970s.) Pezeshkzad is an admirer of Moliere, and his principal buffoons are unstintingly aided: by a cast of lovable lechers, bullies, toadies and fools. The net effect is the epitome of perfect comedy: Within the first few pages you know exactly what to expect--and you cannot wait for it to happen, again and again and again.

The irony of Pezeshkzad's unrestrained and earthy comedy for an American audience is obvious. Is there an American appetite or tolerance for this kind of humor -- emitted from a Third World nation, it is true -- but composed of elements no more liberated about gender and sexuality than, say, the comedies of Plautus or Aristophanes? One's guess is that Pezeshkzad's genius is so great as to easily overpower the fashionable literary prejudices of our day.

But be forewarned: this is comedy for those who laugh at bearded ladies and men, as the Scottish saying goes, "who've got no courage in them." You may not like it, you may feel uncomfortable about it, but you might as well attempt to repeal the human race as to deny its verisimilitude. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin," saith the Bard, and one. sample of "My Uncle Napoleon" should leave properly adjusted American readers desperate for more of this howlingly funny -- not to mention tender, salacious and magical -- Iranian import. As Bertie Wooster might say, it should be "What the Well-read Man is Reading" come this Christmas. Return to top of page
Kirkus Reviews (June 1, 1996)

An uproarious and endearing Iranian novel, first published in Iran over twenty years ago, which became the basis for a highly popular television series.

The story tells of an unruly extended family, living within and around a walled enclave in Tehran in the early 1940s---and specifically of said family's domination by its "Dear Uncle Napoleon" (the portentous rubric by which its fussbudget megalomaniac despot is addressed) as observed and recorded by Uncle's unnamed nephew, whose idealistic love for his beautiful cousin Layli forms one of the two major plotlines here. The other is Uncle's paranoid conviction that all evil flows from his country's ill-advised friendliness with foreign nations, especially Great Britain (the story is set at a time when England and Russia separately schemed to control Iran's oil resources, and preferential trade status was granted the hated British by an impoverished national treasury). Uncle is a brilliant comic creation, whose monstrous egomania and folly are shown all the more powerfully through his unjudging nephew's (usually averted) eyes. Neither his false claim of military heroism nor the fulsome letter he composes to Adolph Hitler (describing his own resistance to British colonialism and soliciting the Führer's protection), significantly ruffles the novel's essential sunniness and serenity. And Pezeshkzad surrounds his memorable antihero with a gallery of superbly drawn supporting characters: Mash Qasem, the resourceful servant who plays pragmatist Sancho Panza to Uncle's self-absorbed Don Quixote; henpecked Dustali Khan, whose fear of his shrewish wife Aziz is vividly exacerbated by an almost Bobbitt-like marital misadventures and Deputy Taymur, a choleric police investigator who discovers labyrinthine plots in every innocent passing remark, and provides a hilarious counterpart and parallel to Uncle's embattled dignity.

Our own paranoid image of Iranians as bomb-toting fanatics looking for Salman Rushdie under every rug might just be altered by this wonderful comic novel, one of the most entertaining books we're likely to see this year. Return to top of page
Middle East Journal (Autumn 1997)

The novel and short story, in their modern form, were introduced into Persian literature earlier in this century. It was in 192] that Muhammad 'Ali Jamalzadeh published the first collection of Persian short stories, his Farsi Shakar Ast. In the last two decades, Persian fiction has reached new heights, and many remarkable novelists and short story writers have published their works. But, strangely enough, there are very few works of fiction in the field of humor, comedy and satire. Apart from some works by Jamalzadeh and Sadiq Hidayat and a few later writers, there are not very many comic novels in Persian.

The works of Iraj Pezeshkzad (b. 1928 and now living in Paris) are exceptions in this respect: Bubul (1960), a collection of stories, Mashallah Khan at the Court of Harun al-Rashid (1971), a satirical work in the tradition of Gulliver's Travels or travellers in time, and Anternasional Bacheh Poru-ha (1984), a hilarious collection of 17 satirical essays on the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iranian expatriates in Paris, are only some of his works. But undoubtedly his masterpiece is Dai Jan Napoleon (My Uncle Napoleon), which, soon after its publication in 1972, was made into a very successful television series. As Dick Davis writes, "It is almost impossible for an Iranian to read the novel without the gestures, voices and faces of the actors who portrayed the characters being present in his or her mind. Certain of these portrayals, especially the actor Parviz Sayad's portrayal of the roue with the heart of gold, Asadollah Mirza, and the late...Parviz Fanizadeh's portrayal of Dear Uncle Napoleon's servant Mash Qasim, have achieved the status of inviolable icons in popular Iranian culture" (p. 7).

Dai Jan Napoleon is the story of the writer's love for his cousin Leila when both were teenagers, and it centers on the events and people who live in several family homes clustered in a larger house belonging to his uncle (Dai Jan Napoleon). Two characters dominate the story: the uncle whose boundless admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte has earned him the nickname of Uncle Napoleon, and his servant Mash Qasim. The former is a retired officer who constantly ruminates over his old adventures, battles and skirmishes with the British troops and insurgent tribes during World War I. Each day he comes to identify himself more and more with Napoleon.

Qasim is a Sancho Panza to this quixotic character, and he continually elaborates on the martial tales of his master in order to reaffirm his Napoleonic valor. Ironically, though Qasim' s motto in life is "never to tell a lie," he has ready answers for every question and claims to have taken part in every conceivable event.

Uncle Napoleon lives in his own imaginary world, which is constantly reaffirmed by his servant and others. Gradually, he comes to believe that he is a person of considerable importance. At the occupation of Iran in 1941 by the British and Soviet forces, he thinks that the British are after him. He writes a letter to Adolf Hitler, asking for help. Intertwined with the hallucinations of this comical character are many family intrigues and quarrels.

Pezeshkzad admirably depicts a large number of characters involved in the story. One of these is Uncle Assadollah, a carefree lady's man, who once had a trip to America and spent a pleasant time in San Francisco. Whenever he recommends a decisive action in an amorous exploit, he says, "Take a trip to San Francisco." Assadollah is the confidant of the writer, the young lover, and urges him to circumvent the action of his Uncle Napoleon (who is planning to marry his daughter to a different cousin) by eloping with Leila. But the "trip to San Francisco" never materializes, and Leila is forced to marry the other cousin. The heartbroken lover leaves for Europe to pursue his studies. Upon his return, however, he meets Qasim at a party. Uncle Napoleon has died, and the servant has become a wealthy man because of some land speculations. Still repeating his old motto and his wild tales, Qasim has now become the great anti-British "champion."

Farcical comedy and satire blend curiously in this novel, with the former being the dominant element. Some of the characters are satirical, but in this respect they vary greatly. Uncle Napoleon and Qasim create an atmosphere of lies and deceit, which may have been intended to represent a microcosm of an autocratic government and its society. One boasts of acts of bravery that were never carried out, and the other tries to validate and perpetuate them with constant affirmation. Uncle Napoleon's claims always seem to suit the demands of the age. It is ironic that, although he was a reactionary royalist during the Constitutional Revolution, he portrays himself as a great "champion" of the Constitution. In this respect he is very similar to Sadiq Hidayat's "Hajji Agha"-a well-to-do cheat and a would-be politician, who has done not a single good deed in his life, but who is always talking about his great achievements.

Uncle Napoleon represents all the foibles and characteristics of his own specific class. His fear of the British and the fact that in everything he sees a conspiratorial plot is not peculiar to him. There are people in Iran who still believe that the Iranian government is run by foreign powers. Though it may seem very bizarre to a Western observer, this is a well-known phenomenon in Iranian society, and there are many individuals who are convinced that much of the recent history of Iran has been engineered from the outside, and most likely from Britain and more recently from the United States. Pezeshkzad has written elsewhere of "how after the novel was published various individuals would ask him how he had known so intimately about the speaker's father or grandfather, so convinced were they that this father or grandfather must have been the model for Uncle Napoleon" (p. 8).

In spite of the distorting and exaggerating mirror of farce and satire, there are individuals who consider the novel to be a "real" depiction of the political scene of Iran. Not only Uncle Napoleon but most of the other characters are created superbly. The interest of the novel lies in the overall depiction of the characters, their comments on human life and the author's realistic description of contemporary Iranian life.

Dick Davis' s translation, as are most of his earlier works, is fluent and accurate. He is very much at home with the style of Pezeshkzad, and he renders it admirably into an English that is neither too formal nor too colloquial. My Uncle Napoleon is an outstanding classic of Iranian fiction.
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Publishers Weekly (June 1996)

The obsessions of Dear Uncle Napoleon, as Pezeshkzad's eponymous Iranian patriarch is nicknamed, furnish this epic, episodic farce with a multitude of mock heroic elements: the "centuries old" honor of his petty aristocratic family; the propriety of his distant relatives; the care of his prize sweetbrier; his mythologized exploits in a Cossack regiment; his hero-worship of Bonaparte; and, above all, his paranoia about English international intrigue on his doorstop. Dear Uncle's extended family's antics don't so much distract him as exacerbate his eccentricities with each new misunderstanding, private feud, clandestine affair and arranged marriage. Told from the naïve perspective of Dear Uncle's least favorite nephew (who is chastely, adolescently in love with his daughter), Pezeshkzad's tale, first published in Iran in the early 1970s, seems innocently obsolete after the Iranian Revolution, like Wodehouse after the Blitz, with its comedy relying heavily on conventions-verbal tics, frenetic dialogue, farcical action and acrobatic reversals of fortune. Pezeshkzad supplies an instantly recognizable, universal cast: the foolish family retainer (the Sancho Panza to Dear Uncle's Quixote), the worldly and womanizing uncle, the disgruntled brother-in-law, the officious local police officer, the brawny butcher with an attractive younger wife. While such characters made the novel a huge bestseller and a national touchstone for comic types in Iran. they don't make the best international travelers, and stateside readers may have trouble discerning, or caring about. how they satirize specific elements of Iranian society.
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The Washington Post (September 29, 1996)
reprinted in International Herald Tribune (October 15, 1996)

My Uncle Napoleon is a surprising novel, a raunchy, irreverent, hilarious farce wrapped around a core of quiet sorrow. Iranian novelist Iraj Pezeshkzad embroils us in the zany antics of an upper-class Iranian family. The book is like one long party, building from one absurd crisis to the next. Laughing our way through, we are unprepared when the party is suddenly over, the uproar replaced by resonant stillness.

The story opens in Iran in the early 1940s. In a Tehran garden, at precisely 2:45 one Friday afternoon in August the unnamed 13 year-old narrator falls in love. The object of his love is his playmate and cousin, Layli. Her father is the Uncle Napoleon of the book's title. The country is on the brink of the Allied invasion, but the garden becomes the scene of another, more personal battle between the narrator's father and Uncle Napoleon. Nicknamed for his idol, Uncle Napoleon likes to tell fictional accounts of his battles with the British. As the revered head of the aristocratic clan that lives--in separate houses--within the enclosed garden, Uncle Napoleon is never contradicted. Only the narrator's father dares to show disbelief.

The result is a family feud that takes on absurd yet tragic dimensions, jeopardizing not only the narrator's love affair but Uncle Napoleon's sanity. Uncle Napoleon's conviction that the British are after him provides the denouement of a tale that is at once a love story, a satire and a farce--but somehow manages to be more than the sum of these parts.

When it was published in Iran in 1970, Dayi-Jan Napoleon became a national phenomenon. In the uneasy years before the 1979 revolution, the television series based on the novel riveted viewers. For a generation of Iranians, the words "San Francisco" became a euphemism for having sex--thanks to another of the narrator's uncles, Asadollah Mirza, Pezeshkzad's irrepressible antihero.

Asadollah is a lecherous, fun-loving diplomat whose answer to most problems is a trip to "San Francisco." Despite his mischievousness, only Asadollah labors to heal the family breach and the hurts it inflicts on his young nephew. His efforts are alternately aided and thwarted by a Neanderthal butcher married to the neighborhood floozy, an overbearing detective with an "internationally known system of surprise attack" and Uncle Napoleon's faithful servant, Mash Ghasem, who claims a role in his master's imaginary exploits and begins each utterance with the phrase "Why should I lie?"

In the original, the novel drew much of its authenticity from its salty colloquialisms and perceptive detailing of cultural foibles. British-born Dick Davis, who is married to an Iranian and has spent years in Iran, manages to evoke this richness in a translation that is faithful without being literal.

Davis also provides ample cultural and historical context in his preface to the novel. His account of Iran's history of British exploitation is an essential backdrop for the work. It helps explain why Hitler, abhorred in the West, was viewed in Iran only in the context of his enmity with England (Uncle Napoleon writes him a letter asking for succor from the British). Pezeshkzad lampoons the wide spread Iranian belief that British-or American-conspiracies are everywhere. Yet even as he pokes fun at Uncle Napoleon for blaming his domestic tangles on the British, the author validates the profound mistrust Iranians feel toward Western governments-a mistrust rooted in painful realities.

Davis's remarkable achievement is a gift both to readers fascinated by other cultures and to lovers of fiction for fiction's sake. At a time when most Americans' views of Iran are shaped by the nightly news, My Uncle Napoleon captures the humanity of a people long caricaturized in the West. Never mind that Pezeshkzad's novel is a caricature as well. It remains a multifaceted, authentic portrait of a time and place. As such, it is a reminder that Iranians, like everybody else, laugh, feud and--yes--have illicit sex (although not as continually as the characters in this novel).

But Pezeshkzad, like any author of substance, transcends his cultural boundaries. His writing is full of gusto and humor. My Uncle Napoleon poignantly evokes that communality of life that is so quintessentially Eastern. In this book, as in Iran, the operative unit is the family, not the individual--at least until events intervene.

In this case, the events in question lead to the narrator's departure from the garden where he grew up. The quiet epilogue stands in stark contrast with the rest of the work. Understated and eloquent, it is written in a wholly altered voice by a man who has left childhood too far behind. His family, like so many Iranian families, has scattered across the globe. His life is empty of the exquisite highs, the anguished lows, of his youth. The bright bubble of beleaguered love has burst. My Uncle Napoleon tells the wrenching story of a boy's, and a country's, loss of innocence. Return to top of page
The Washington Times (March 9, 1997)

Iraj Pezeshkzad is a well-known author in his native Iran. A scholar, former judge and member of Iran's Foreign Ministry, he now resides in Paris. My Uncle Napoleon (Mage Publishers, $29.95, 528 pages) is a fine introduction to Mr. Pezeshkzad's work and wit for an American audience.

This is a comic novel, taking place during the early 1940's in Tehran, and it is very visual; high jinks and slapstick abound. Understandably, the book was turned into a highly successful television series in Iran.

The action takes place in a family compound where members of "Dear Uncle's" family and those of his siblings and cousins encounter one another for family get-togethers, fights, misunderstandings, reconciliations and even an occasional shooting.

The narrator is a 13-year-old nephew of Dear Uncle Napoleon -- so called because of his blind admiration for the French general -- who has just discovered that he is in love with his lovely dark-eyed cousin, Layli. Tormented by thoughts of love, anguished by the idea that Layli (who at 14 is considered old enough to wed) is to marry an insipid cousin and intrigued by the feud between his father and Dear Uncle, the young narrator is urged to "go to San Francisco" by a roue uncle -- "going to San Francisco" being Uncle Napoleon's euphemism for making love.

There are some wonderfully funny scenes in the garden of the compound between various family members, a jealous butcher with a beautiful young wife, an Indian tenant and the local incompetent police force. Dear Uncle believes all of Iran's ills are British-born and is convinced the British are seeking to destroy him. His attempt to write to Hitler for protection is another source of comic antics.

Despite its superficial characters and their repetitive raging, "My Uncle Napoleon" gives the reader an amusing, satirical picture of life among the privileged and their servants in Tehran at the beginning of World War II, a long-gone era. It is striking how little anyone did, other than eat, scheme and complain. And of course, there were countless trips to San Francisco, some only planned, others neatly executed. Return to top of page

World Literature Review (Winter 1997)

Iranians are fortunate to have two popular novels that poke good-humored fun at their ways and foibles, and especially their preoccupations. The first is James Morier's Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, published in 1824 and translated into Persian in the late 1880s. For a long time many Persians refused to believe that such a book could have been written by a foreigner, so accurately did it depict certain of their attitudes and ways of behaving. The second is My Uncle Napoleon, published in Persian in Tehran in the early 1970s. Its popularity grew quickly, and it soon became the best-selling novel of the postwar period. It was made into an enormously popular TV series and is still read by Persians from all walks of life.

Set in Tehran during the waning days of World War II, the story follows the chaste love affair of the youthful narrator and Layli, daughter of Uncle Napoleon, the patriarch of a large extended family who is gruffly benevolent toward his relatives and servants. The narrator's family mentor is an uncle, worldly wise, uninhibited, and somewhat of a libertine, who provides a perfect balance for the naive idealism of his nephew. The account also follows the increasing suspicions of Uncle Napoleon that a British conspiracy is behind all the problems of his family and, indeed, of the nation. Many of the elements of a farce are present: stereotyped sex roles, misunderstandings due to social differences and sexual tensions and rivalries, characters who are comic foils for others, and a fast-moving and episodic plot. The characters, while exaggerated, nevertheless remain true enough to their social and educational positions in Persian society to be recognized by anyone familiar with Iran.

In many cases novels of social satire are written for "insiders," as it were, and are too densely culture-specific to appeal to others. Persian culture is very different from Western culture, and in this novel some of the attitudes expressed by the characters might prove too strong for the stomachs of the politically correct. Here the universal theme of young love and its obstacles is set in a rich local context, and only a skillful and creative translation can carry such a novel successfully to those who know little or nothing of its cultural setting. In the case of My Uncle Napoleon the translation is so sensitive to the author's tone and to the levels of language used by the characters that the Western reader, unfamiliar with Iran, needs only a minimum of help to enjoy and appreciate both the comic and serious aspects of the book.

The translator has provided a useful preface, a roster of the principal characters, and a map of Iran for the benefit of all readers. The book is elegantly produced and is a credit to its publishers. Return to top of page

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