It’s been a while since I read this and my recollection’s hazy, but a strong and desolate and horrific atmosphere persists that assures me it was a joIt’s been a while since I read this and my recollection’s hazy, but a strong and desolate and horrific atmosphere persists that assures me it was a journey. Not, perhaps, a journey requiring quite so many pages: though short (100 pages) for a novel, this is really a novella, and could easily have fit (and had room to breathe) in half its current length. I’m presuming Hedayat was a Poe fan, because at his best he almost equals the Divine Edgar, not word-for-word (who does?) or passage-for-passage, but in his conjurer’s ability to place us in – to surround and absorb us with – psychic landscapes of hideous yet seductive power. The story, plotwise, is scant – it’s most all psychology and atmosphere – but the few plot-points it hinges on, Poe-like, are haunting, paradoxical. As I say, my impression’s shadowy: a murderer, an old man or demon, a graveyard, a sickbed scene that seemed to go for fifty pages, a snake-hipped siren who taunts the “hero” into madness, a kind of two-tiered reality-inverting structure that went down like a “Tell-Tale Heart” sandwich, with all the attendant gagging and indigestion that suggests. Not fun, not wholesome, but meaty. Something to chew on, in any case, if you don’t mind game. And despite my three (four?) mentions of the Master in this paragraph, something unique....more
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