Product Description

The Promessa, a 1970s cocktail bar, is to be reopened in Tehran - not as the glamorous location it once was, but as a slick showroom for art, fashion, and corporate receptions - a heady mix of profit, culture, and metropolitan swagger. By and by, a hidden agenda among the key players emerges, involving an international network with gruesome intentions. Join the narrator, a young man with artistic ambitions who has no wish to disappoint his cosmopolitan backers, as he frantically struggles to open the Promessa on time. Shamelessly opportunistic, he turns local painters into stage props, militia members into video artists, and a spate in prison into a career opportunity. This book takes a frenetic, compelling look at modern Tehran, conspiracy theories, political fashions and the omnivorous international art world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #723552 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 215 pages

Review
'The most surprising novel I've read in recent years. Entertainingly packaged as a bizarre thriller, it comes from the most unexpected corner of the world. A great way to learn something about Tehran today.' Andrei Kurkov'Funny, cynical and sharp.' Tom McCarthy

Andrei Kurkov
`The most surprising novel I've read in recent years.'

About the Author
Tirdad Zolghadr is an independent critic and curator born in 1973. Aside from the field of contemporary art, Zolghadr has worked in journalism, translation and documentary film. He is also a founding member of the Shahrzad art & design collective.

Customer Reviews

A strange mix: highbrow art in a police state
Tirdad Zolghadr's novel is definitely one of the strangest I have ever read. It revolves around the narrator's return to Iran after years studying abroad and his progress revitalising a former nightlub, named the Promessa and turning it into a exhibition centre for modern art and cultural and fashion-based installations.

As the novel porgresses, there are plenty of snapshots of a very modern Iran. A Tehran full of modern housing estates, peopled by sexually liberated, drug-taking artists. It's a far cry from the stereotypical image of fundamentalists we get in the media. There are also interesting passages about Tehran's police and security service and the working of one of the country's most notorious jails. Throughout the story the almost nameless narrator is accompanied by a series of unusual figures, Dr Tan Christenhuber, his childhood art academic mentor; Zsa Zsa, the former owner of the Promessa in its 1970s heyday; Tarofi, the shady mullah and most enigmatically of all, Stella, a foreign friend who by email directs the narrator's every move.

At times Zolghadr (himself an art curator by profession) lost me in his extensive descriptions of the artistic ideal, of cultural references and modern installationist art. At times, the verbose nature of his narrative seemed to be almost making fun of art's self-indulgence, but this is perhaps an in-joke. At other times however, when Zolghadr writes about Iran, the revolution or the wearing of the veil (both in contemporary Iran an medievel Europe) he is fascinating.

Ultimately as a novel this didn't work for me. Part art thesis part political thriller; the art thesis side was too obscure for me and the thriller side only made itself apparent intermittantly. If you like contemporary art you will enjoy this, if not, a lot of this may just seem like too much hard work.