At the Wall of the Almighty

I know that I’m in the hallways of El-Deen, the central prison of the Holy Republic, and I know that this guard is taking me from my solitary confinement – the Black Box – to cell number four, cell of the Unbreakables. But this is all I know… So begins our hero’s narration. But Loony Kamal, the prison guard, doesn’t believe him. Is it really possible for a man to forget who he is? To lose every shred of memory? Loony Kamal is bent on finding out. Our narrator, though, is even more determined to survive. Their relationship – with its inhuman brutality and surprising tenderness – lies at the complicated heart of Farnoosh Moshiri’s extraordinary debut novel. Which is where we quickly find ourselves, too, for we want what each man wants: like Kamal, we want to know more about our hero; like our hero, we long for his escape from Kamal’s grasp and the prison’s walls. As if he were a latter-day Sherazade, our hero fights for his life by retreating into a world of stories – or memories? – of grandmothers and peacocks, love songs and saffron smells, and the softness of a young girl’s hand pulling him up onto a magic carpet that flies down New Spring Street, over the crooked houses, to the Almighty Wall, which Ali the Bricklayer stacks taller every night. The grim unreality of life inside the prison falls darkly upon us, but the fire of Moshiri’s imagination also lights the way to a different world. The masterful whole she fashions of torture and fragments is essential reading not just for those interested in the seldom-heard voices of Iranian women, but for those who care about the progress of literature.