Quote:"Escher-like. . . . Kundera-like. . . . [Mandanipour] build[s] a clever Rubik's Cube of a story, while at the same time giving readers a haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran: arduous, demoralizing and constricted." -🌞 Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"Mandanipour expresses the complexity of his culture-not just of the society of the Islamic Republic, but of the underlying Persian traditions that continue to influence it." -🌞 Claire Messud, New York Review of Books
In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social...