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My Uncle Napoleon Hardcover – January 1, 1996
- Print length507 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMage Pub
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 1996
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.5 x 10 inches
- ISBN-100934211485
- ISBN-13978-0934211482
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Review
Set in a garden in Tehran in the early 1940s, where three families live under the tyranny of a paranoid patriarch, My Uncle Napoleon is a rich, comic and brilliantly on-target send-up of Iranian society. The novel is, at its core, a love story. But the young narrator's delicate and pure love for his cousin Layli is constantly jeopardized by an unforgettable cast of family members and the hilarious mayhem of their intrigues and machinations. It is also a social satire, a lampooning of the widespread Iranian belief that foreigners (particularly the British) are responsible for events that occur in Iran. But most of all it is a very enjoyable, often side-splitting read that you wish did not have to end. First published in Iran in the early 1970s, the novel became an all-time best-seller. In 1976 it was turned into a television series and immediately captured the imagination of the whole nation - its story became a cultural reference point and its characters national icon! Dick Davis' superb English translation has not only captured the uproarious humor of the original but has also caught the delicate, underlying vibrancy of the Persian. -- From the Publisher
Product details
- Publisher : Mage Pub; 1st edition (January 1, 1996)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 507 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0934211485
- ISBN-13 : 978-0934211482
- Item Weight : 2.25 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.5 x 10 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,523,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #360 in Middle Eastern Literature (Books)
- #22,219 in Poetry (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Dick Davis brings a unique array of gifts to the challenges of translating Hafez and his contemporaries. In his own right, he is a poet of great technical accomplishment and emotional depth. He is also the foremost English-speaking scholar of medieval Persian poetry now working in the West. Numerous honors testify to his talents. In the U.K., he received the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award for his second book of poems, Seeing the World, in 1981; his Selected Poems was chosen by both the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph as a Book of the Year in 1989; and his collection Belonging was selected as the Poetry Book of the Year by The Economist in 2003. In the U.S., A Kind of Love—the American edition of his Selected Poems—received the Ingram Merrill prize for “excellence in poetry” in 1993. He has received awards for his scholarship from the Arts Council of Great Britain, The British Institute of Persian Studies, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and he is the recipient of grants for his translations from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Twice, in 2000 and 2001, he received the Translation Award of the International Society for Iranian Studies, and in 2001 he received an Encyclopedia Iranica award for “services to Persian poetry.” His translation of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: the Persian Book of Kings was chosen as one of the “ten best books of 2006” by the Washington Post.
Davis read English at Cambridge, lived in Iran for eight years (he met and married his Iranian wife Afkham Darbandi there), then completed a PhD in Medieval Persian Literature at the University of Manchester. He has resided for extended periods in both Greece and Italy (his translations include works from Italian), and has taught at both the University of California and at Ohio State University, where he was for nine years Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages, retiring from that position in 2012. In all, he has published more than twenty books.
Among the qualities that distinguish his poetry and scholarship are exacting technical expertise and wide cultural sympathy—an ability to enter into distant cultural milieus both intellectually and emotionally. In choosing his volume of poems Belonging as a “Book of the Year” for 2006, The Economist praised it as “a profound and beautiful collection” that gave evidence of “a commitment to an ideal of civilized life shared by many cultures.” the Times Literary Supplement has called him “our finest translator of Persian poetry.”
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The characters are not "realistic." Heaven forfend! They are loving and comic exaggerations of real Persians, who could never be mistaken for (say) Japanese or Americans. For one obvious thing, there is the huge importance of the Very Extended Family, a simple fact of Persian life. In fact, some thinker once commented that Persians are still living a "tribal" life behind the walls of their homes. Is that true? Well, when I was in Iran, I had a best friend who, over a period of two years, introduced me to about 200 members of his family, and to precisely one unrelated friend! If I had to try to reciprocate as an American, I'd be stuck after the first four or five members of my immediate family...
The stuff about "England being responsible for everything" really hits home, and is probably the reason the book became a runaway hit in Persia itself. I hope everyone noticed that during the recent anti-government riots in Persia, the crazed mullahs immediately arrested eight staff at the British Embassy! The loony but lovable old character, "Uncle Napoleon" goes so far as to believe that all of his failures in life happened because of a British Plot. And one reason he is the universe's biggest fan of Napoleon Bonaparte is (guess why!)....because Napoleon was a great enemy of England!
England! Perfidious Albion! That sceptred isle of mad plotters, that counterfeit jewel set in a sea of treachery.... Well, you get the idea.
For me, the most important extra-literary point of this book is that it shows us The Real Iran, a very human place where people fall in love, get married, write poems, and fall into insane rivalries. Neither the Iran of the Shah, nor the Iran of Khomeini: it has existed for thousands of years, and right now (perhaps) waits to be reborn.
By the way, the title for this review, "But what if the murder victim refuses to come along?" points out the Monty Python in this book. A man runs away --- vanishes --- and some family member decides to accuse another family member of killing him. The police are called, and the numskull detective (following his "international method of surprise attack") immediately refers to the missing man as "the murder victim." He does it so insistently that others pick up his habit --- and then the missing man turns up alive. They call the detective, who instructs them to show up the next morning with "the murder victim." They answer, "But what if the murder victim refuses to come along?" Said totally dead-pan, of course! :-) :-)
I would read this book along with Taheri's "The Persian Night" to try to get a grasp on the immensity of the tragedy. That is, try to imagine ANY of the characters in "My Uncle Napoleon" falling for the crazy party line of the mullahs in any real way. You can imagine them PRETENDING to do so, if it will help them steal a march on a family rival, but REALLY?
As they used to sing on the mountain, "Man zan-e mullah ne misham! Chera ne mishid?" ("I will never consent to be the wife of a mullah," sings the soloist. "Why not?" sings the raucous chorus. The rest can be supplied for you by a Persian friend.... :-) )
By the way, I believe the complete Persian TV series has shown up on YouTube. No subtitles that I've seen yet, alas. Search for "Daie Jan Napelon."
The book is full of scandals and follies and grotesque situation. Along with the family saga it reveals a beautiful love story between the narrator boy and his cousin girl.
The book flows without a dull moment. It is an easy and fun book to read.
At the same time, and in plangent minor key, a one-sided love story is told. Which, we learn in the postscript, was modeled after the romantic arrow that afflicted the author.
One could write more, by why? Get the book, read it!
I loved My Uncle Napoleon. My Uncle Napoleon captures the essence of the tensions, strengths and challenges of the extended Iranian family and in all its beauty. The book is fun to read, entertaining and informative. I highly recommend it.