What is a person? And, nonetheless extra vital, what’s love? These are the questions posed by Salar Abdoh’s newest novel, A Nearby Country Called Love. Manhood and the seek for love bedevil Abdoh’s dispirited protagonist, Issa. Deported from the United States after years working a deadening resort job, Issa has returned to his childhood neighborhood in Tehran, Iran. He by no means knew his mom, and his inventive homosexual brother died younger of AIDS, adopted rapidly by his macho father. Though Issa cherished them, he struggled to know his brother, and his father’s dedication to make actual males out of each of them was damaging. Even after his father’s passing, a tradition of crushing patriarchy overshadows Issa’s life: The novel opens with Issa and his pal Nasser ineffectively making an attempt to avenge a lady who discovered her husband so insupportable that she burned herself to loss of life.
Into this violent, hypermasculine society, Abdoh introduces characters who quietly insist on being themselves, permitting Issa to see totally different, much less inflexible methods of being. They embody Mehran, the homosexual man who turns into powerful man Nasser’s unbelievable lover; Mehran’s roommate, a trans man; and Babacar, a Senegalese man who’s all the time late for prayers however desires to change into a Shia cleric. There’s additionally Issa’s formidable Turkish stepmother (who has a person’s identify) and her equally formidable daughter, a health care provider whose estranged husband torments her till he learns to not. Then, there’s Hayat, the younger girl whose poetry Issa fell so in love with that he sojourned to Lebanon to satisfy her, not even realizing her actual identify.
When Issa and Hayat lastly meet, she’s . . . not what he imagined. More bother ensues. But Issa, a supremely loving, compassionate and accepting spirit (his very identify means Jesus) fails to know that he’s already surrounded by the love he seeks. In Abdoh’s unhappy, hilarious, big-hearted guide, the close by nation referred to as love is the very place the place Issa stands.
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