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| Jaafar Modarres-Sadeghi |
Fiction/Novel |
| Marsh |
| [Gavkhuni] |
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| Translated from the Persian by Afkham Darbandi. |
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| The Marsh is a novella presented as the first person narrative of a young, unnamed, male narrator. The story opens with a dream made up of the narrator’s memories of bathing as a boy, in company with his father and his father’s friends, in Isfahan’s Zayandehrud river. The narrator marries after the death of his father. Gradually he becomes alienated from daily life, and lives out an obsessive imaginary relationship with his dead father. As the novel proceeds we see him withdraw from his wife and her family, as well as from his former friends and job in Tehran, until he—and the reader— are quite unable to distinguish reality from hallucinatory fantasy. The novel ends with an ambiguous closure that may indicate death or a final descent into all-encompassing psychosis. |
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 | Jaafar Modarres-Sadeghi
Jaafar Modarres-Sadeghi was born in 1954 in Isfahan. He is the critically acclaimed author of several collections of short stories and novels, including On Taraf-e Khiyaban [The Other Side of the Street], Vaqaye'-e Ettefaqiyyeh [Something Happened], Davazdah Dastan [Twelve Stories], Ab-o Khak [The Homeland], Tup-e Shabaneh [The Nightly Gun], Didar dar Halab [Appointment in Allepo], Nakojaabad [Nowhereland], Balon-e Mahta [Mahta’s Balloon], His novel, Gavkhuni (translated into English as The Marsh), was published by Mazda in 1996. |
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