The Blind Owl: Authorized by The Sadegh Hedayat Foundation - First Translation into English Based on the Bombay Edition

by Sadegh Hedayat, Naveed Noori (Translator)

108 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2025

About the author

Among Iranian writers who introduced modernist techniques into Persian fiction. He is considered one of the greatest Iranian writers of the 20th century.

هدایت از پیشگامان داستان‌نویسی نوین ایران و از روشنفکران برجسته ایرانی بود. حجم آثار و مقالات نوشته شده درباره نوشته‌ها، نوع زندگی و خودکشی صادق هدایت بیانگر تأثیر ژرف او بر جریان روشنفکری ایران است. هرچند شهرت عام هدایت نویسندگی است، آثاری از نویسندگان بزرگ را نیز ترجمه کرده‌است. صادق هدایت در ۱۹ فروردین سال ۱۳۳۰ در پاریس خودکشی کرد. آرامگاه وی در گورستان پرلاشز پاریس واقع است

Reviews

[RobynReadsBooks]

Well. That escalated.

I picked this up at 1 a.m. because I couldn’t sleep and apparently decided what I needed was 100+ pages of death, hallucination, sexual shame, murder, existential despair and a narrator whose grip on reality is about as reliable as mine in the middle of the night.

I do like spending time trapped inside someone else’s deteriorating consciousness though.

Very much a looping fever dream about desire/death/loneliness and all kinds of contradictions collapsing into one another.

Still not sure what I really read to be honest. I won’t pretend I’ve solved Hedayat here. Absolutely sure I’ll be thinking about it for a while. Want to reread.

Dark. Lonely. Profoundly unstable. Confusing as fuck.

So I loved it.

What a find. Recommend going in… blind ;)

[Naz]

The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat is a nightmare you endure alongside a fractured narrator trapped in a perpetual loop of psychological damnation through a circular structure where time dissolves and the same torment is relived in different ways. The narrator is a prisoner of a vicious circle. He cannot escape his past his overwhelming guilt or the phantoms of his own mind. Every desperate attempt to break free only loops him right back to his original inescapable agony. It was amazing. I do not recommend.

The English translation is not as good as the original Persian. Going to read the new 2025 Swedish translation in the week.

[Michael Chance]

A hallucinatory vision that turns ever in upon itself in crazed struggle. Needs to be read more than once I think. I found the choice of using italics for the second section slightly distracting and unnecessary.

[Jessica Brooks]

I listened to the audiobook first, and I will definitely go back and read it in print before forming a solid opinion.

[RATA !!!]

3.00 ★ — I liked it, yeah. But I’ve come across something that bothers me a LOT while I’m reading a book; I hate so much when they repeat the same thing so many times. Sometimes I even had the feeling that I was reading the same thing over and over again.

Other than that, this book has a wonderful premise and prose . Pretty scary and thoughtful at times. With some phrases with which many people can feel identified about "what is death" or about loneliness.