Product Description

Written in Persian, The Blind Owl is predominantly a love story, an unconventional love story that elicits visions and nightmare reveries from the depths of the reader's subconscious. A young man, an old man and a beautiful young girl perform, as if framed within a Persian miniature, a ritual of destruction as gradually the narrator, and the reader, discover the meaning hidden within the dreams. This unforgettable story contains a unique blend of the mystery of the Arabian Nights and an acutely contemporary sense of panic and hallucination. The Blind Owl was written during the oppressive latter years of Reza Shah's rule (1925-1941). It was originally published in a limited edition in Bombay, during Hedayat's year-long stay there in 1937, stamped with "not for sale or publication in Iran." It first appeared in Tehran in 1941 (as a serial in the daily Iran), after Erza Shah's abdication, and had an immediate and forceful effect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #179904 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 150 pages

About the Author
Sadegh Hedayat was born in Teheran in 1903, of an aristocratic family, and spent most of his life there. In 1951, during a stay in Paris, Hedayat committed suicide. Recognised as the outstanding Persian writer of the century, Hedayat is generally credited with having brought his country's language and literature into the mainstream of contemporary writing.

Customer Reviews

Persian Haunted Tale
This is a strange, affecting, poetic book. The author killed himself after he wrote it, so it reeks of death worship, but there are moments of solid poetic beauty in the text. The Blind Owl is unlike anything else you will ever read, and defies linear interpretation. Existential Persian magic fatalism; interesting stuff all round.

quite remarkable
This is how H P Lovecraft would have liked to have written, just as mad but with a poetry and flow that Lovecraft tended to lack. It's very short which makes it certainly a worthwhile read even if it would not normally be your sort of thing at all.

Blind Truth.
An extremely interesting book. Given Hedayat's suicide after it, it gains an added poignancy when being read, but this ultimately shouldn't overshadow the dense, mercurial, poetic, slippery - and indeed sometimes satiric - prose. Probably unlike anything else you will ever read.