2007 books

56) Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 1937
Hedayat’s writing has been banned in Iran since November 2006 so The Blind Owl, his most famous book, is the obvious first port of call for readers new to him. It begins with a mysterious woman’s murder by a rather deranged man in the ancient Persian city of Rey, then follows his own dreamlike self-portrait as a man who has lost his grip on life. The book is either a veiled, opium-drenched, mysogynist rant with similarly high levels of angst and self-loathing or, as is widely believed, a Kafkaesque masterpiece. I expect the truth falls somewhere in between but I won’t default towards the latter opinion, as it’s still a very hard book to figure out without learning a little more about Hedayat. This is a deliberately uncomfortable read that also defies accurate categorisation, it’s out there on the margins of European-influenced literature but only of any real value to existentialism – if you read Kafka you'll certainly get much more out of it.