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The young eponymous heroine in this warm-hearted debut embodies the complexity of Iran in the runup to the 1979 revolution
Unwanted by her father and so abandoned by her mother, in 1953 a baby girl is found under a mulberry tree in wealthy north Tehran. Carrying her home to the impoverished tenements of the southern city, Behrouz – an army driver who, as a motherless boy, pretended to be a mother himself – names her Aria. It’s usually a boy’s name meaning “the Iranian race”, but Behrouz intends the musical sense of the word: “little tales, cries in the night”. This ambiguity continues, for as Aria grows, she wavers between opposed categories: rich and poor, educated and illiterate, orthodox Shia Muslim and something else. Years later Behrouz reflects on his charge: “She had somehow acquired the ability to be two things in one.”His neighbours are generally hostile to this illegitimate child. “I bet with those blue eyes that girl’s a Jew or a jinn’s daughter,” says one. And Behrouz’s wife, Zahra, the first in a line of false or flawed mother figures, beats and neglects the orphan, often locking her out on the balcony. Her bad behaviour is glaring, but Zahra turns out to be a complex character. One of the many strengths of this strong debut by Iranian-Canadian novelist Nazanine Hozar is that every character is contextualised and therefore humanised by an explanatory backstory.
And the balcony isn’t so bad. Here Aria is able to communicate with Kamran, the neighbour’s cleft-lipped son, who climbs a tree to deliver bracelets and sweets to her. His love for Aria will develop through the years, and his bitterness after rejection help shape his later career. Continue reading...