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Afsaneh: Short Stories by Iranian Women
Whether negotiating often-treacherous paths through political and religious upheavals or threading their way through dreams and fantasies, the characters in these stories are vivid and compelling enough to challenge and surprise anyone unfamiliar with Iranian life and literature.
From the oppressive atmosphere before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Simin Daneshvar’s Whom Shall I Greet? to Shahrnoosh Parsipour’s mesmerising story of women who blur distinctions between reality and dreams in Crystal Pendants, these tales brim with the inner lives, attitudes and outlooks of women in Iran.
Kaveh Basmenji was born in Tehran in 1961 and started work as a journalist at the age of sixteen. He has translated several Western literary works into Persian, and has worked for Reuters and the Middle East Times. His publications include Tehran Blues: Youth Culture in Iran (Saqi) and several collections of essays and poems. He lives in Prague.
From the oppressive atmosphere before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Simin Daneshvar’s Whom Shall I Greet? to Shahrnoosh Parsipour’s mesmerising story of women who blur distinctions between reality and dreams in Crystal Pendants, these tales brim with the inner lives, attitudes and outlooks of women in Iran.
Kaveh Basmenji was born in Tehran in 1961 and started work as a journalist at the age of sixteen. He has translated several Western literary works into Persian, and has worked for Reuters and the Middle East Times. His publications include Tehran Blues: Youth Culture in Iran (Saqi) and several collections of essays and poems. He lives in Prague.
200 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 7, 2022
This is the second collection of women writers published by SAQI I’ve read in the last few years, the other being Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Womenand as with that one, the quality and variety of the stories featured is high. From the author bios’ most were born between 1931 and 1965 but they feel surprisingly modern perhaps because little has changed for women since the time of writing. As Kaveh Basmenji writes in her introduction, ‘stories by women writers’ began to appear only in the first half of the twentieth century in the wake of the Constitutional Movement’, before 1931 the only mention of a Persian female writer was the infamous Sheherezad.
My favorites were To Whom Shall I Say Hello? where an older woman who is widowed and poor laments for her daughter who is in a loveless abusive marriage and treated as a servant but cannot leave, The Shemiran Bus which is a lovely story of a little girl’s friendship with a bus driver and Garden of Sorrow, about a beautiful garden a child lives next to and the remarriage of her mother which meant she was often sent to her grandmothers. Other favorites include Midnight Drum where a woman can’t sleep at night waiting for her husband to come home, a man she does not love or desire, Dahlia about a woman who wants her mother to live with her against her husband’s wishes and Eclipse where a mother cannot accept her husband’s death, so her daughter visits her grandfather for something to prove it to her. Finally, there is The Stain, a simple shorter story about the day in a life of a woman who is reflecting on her thirty-year marriage and the peace and quiet of an uneventful life. All the stories, however, are successful in capturing the lives of Iranian women, their struggles, desires, constraints and emotions.
Men do not come off well in these stories, bullying husbands with their commands and expectations including the expectation of sex whenever they desire it without regard to the women. There are some men who are hardworking fathers and caring partners though and indeed there are lots of ungrateful children of both sexes. There are some stories that have magical elements like Moniru Ravanipour’s, Mana, Kind Mana and The Blue Ones which both feature mermaids who mourn the men who die at sea and there are a few that refer to the Iraq/Iranian war. Several of the stories feature older women looking back and wishing for their childhood where they were free to run and jump play and several show women defying husbands and children, deciding for themselves what they can and cannot do. Overall, a real mixture of styles and tone but not a dud in the collection and an engaging and insightful portrait of the lives of the women of Iran.
My favorites were To Whom Shall I Say Hello? where an older woman who is widowed and poor laments for her daughter who is in a loveless abusive marriage and treated as a servant but cannot leave, The Shemiran Bus which is a lovely story of a little girl’s friendship with a bus driver and Garden of Sorrow, about a beautiful garden a child lives next to and the remarriage of her mother which meant she was often sent to her grandmothers. Other favorites include Midnight Drum where a woman can’t sleep at night waiting for her husband to come home, a man she does not love or desire, Dahlia about a woman who wants her mother to live with her against her husband’s wishes and Eclipse where a mother cannot accept her husband’s death, so her daughter visits her grandfather for something to prove it to her. Finally, there is The Stain, a simple shorter story about the day in a life of a woman who is reflecting on her thirty-year marriage and the peace and quiet of an uneventful life. All the stories, however, are successful in capturing the lives of Iranian women, their struggles, desires, constraints and emotions.
Men do not come off well in these stories, bullying husbands with their commands and expectations including the expectation of sex whenever they desire it without regard to the women. There are some men who are hardworking fathers and caring partners though and indeed there are lots of ungrateful children of both sexes. There are some stories that have magical elements like Moniru Ravanipour’s, Mana, Kind Mana and The Blue Ones which both feature mermaids who mourn the men who die at sea and there are a few that refer to the Iraq/Iranian war. Several of the stories feature older women looking back and wishing for their childhood where they were free to run and jump play and several show women defying husbands and children, deciding for themselves what they can and cannot do. Overall, a real mixture of styles and tone but not a dud in the collection and an engaging and insightful portrait of the lives of the women of Iran.
September 15, 2025
(review for “Eclipse” (Qodsi Qazi-Nour, tr. Kaveh Basmenji))
This story reminded me how much I love flash fiction: short stories lend themselves to analysis far better than novels, having to leave out information, being more compact and therefore necessarily allusive and elusive.
“Eclipse” is the model “open” text: a nebulous and reticent piece of writing that invites the reader to interrogate it. Ambiguity is the prime characteristic of works best suited for analysis. While all media are incomplete without an interpretation—art cannot exist in a vacuum—the need for audience participation becomes the most apparent here.
In “Eclipse,” we see reality through the world-weary eyes of an unnamed protagonist who lives with her depressed mother. Of the atmosphere in their house, she remarks: “his presence is everywhere, like heavy air,” leaving the reader to wonder about “his” identity, and why the two women are so haunted by his absence. The narrator leaves her mother to visit her grandfather, whom she asks for a keepsake—any keepsake—of the dead man, justifying her request by reminding him of her mother’s need for closure. However, from the way she talks (not to other characters, but to the readers) it is obvious that she needs an ending as much as her mother: her inner speech is stark and detached from the world, comprised of bare-bones declarative sentences with barely any adjectives and almost no recursion: main clauses follow one after the other with no ornamentation and filler, evoking a sense of bluntness and resignation. She never talks about her own emotions (the author is amazing at avoiding exposition), betraying her own emotional unavailability brought on by grief.
The word “Eclipse” works perfectly as the title of a text that’s so suggestive and allusive that it appears half-obscured. In reply to her request, the narrator’s grandfather hands her a picture of the dead man, which she never describes beyond his hair and closed eyes, leaving us with the impression of a half-hidden visage. Eclipses also tend to be associated with death, an interpretation that the prophet Mohammed dismisses in the Sahih al-Bukhari hadith collection. With his presence weighing down the house “like heavy air,” the dead person’s absence eclipses all other parts of the protagonist’s life.
It is remarkable how Qazi-Nour manages to fit a compelling and highly economical miniature study of grief and family dynamics in only four pages
This story reminded me how much I love flash fiction: short stories lend themselves to analysis far better than novels, having to leave out information, being more compact and therefore necessarily allusive and elusive.
“Eclipse” is the model “open” text: a nebulous and reticent piece of writing that invites the reader to interrogate it. Ambiguity is the prime characteristic of works best suited for analysis. While all media are incomplete without an interpretation—art cannot exist in a vacuum—the need for audience participation becomes the most apparent here.
In “Eclipse,” we see reality through the world-weary eyes of an unnamed protagonist who lives with her depressed mother. Of the atmosphere in their house, she remarks: “his presence is everywhere, like heavy air,” leaving the reader to wonder about “his” identity, and why the two women are so haunted by his absence. The narrator leaves her mother to visit her grandfather, whom she asks for a keepsake—any keepsake—of the dead man, justifying her request by reminding him of her mother’s need for closure. However, from the way she talks (not to other characters, but to the readers) it is obvious that she needs an ending as much as her mother: her inner speech is stark and detached from the world, comprised of bare-bones declarative sentences with barely any adjectives and almost no recursion: main clauses follow one after the other with no ornamentation and filler, evoking a sense of bluntness and resignation. She never talks about her own emotions (the author is amazing at avoiding exposition), betraying her own emotional unavailability brought on by grief.
The word “Eclipse” works perfectly as the title of a text that’s so suggestive and allusive that it appears half-obscured. In reply to her request, the narrator’s grandfather hands her a picture of the dead man, which she never describes beyond his hair and closed eyes, leaving us with the impression of a half-hidden visage. Eclipses also tend to be associated with death, an interpretation that the prophet Mohammed dismisses in the Sahih al-Bukhari hadith collection. With his presence weighing down the house “like heavy air,” the dead person’s absence eclipses all other parts of the protagonist’s life.
It is remarkable how Qazi-Nour manages to fit a compelling and highly economical miniature study of grief and family dynamics in only four pages
September 22, 2017
Some of these stories are very good. However, overall, it is a very, very sad collection. Iranian women are abused by men, neglected by children and nothing good ever happens to them...
August 16, 2023
A collection of stories about misfortune Iranian women
Some stories had the same idea and kept repeating themselves
Old ladies left out alone and this kind of stories
Some stories had the same idea and kept repeating themselves
Old ladies left out alone and this kind of stories
March 19, 2013
A window into the less visible portion of Iranian society, these short stories by Iranian women writers illuminate the often murky aspects of married life, the attendant restrictions that face women in Islamic communities. There are quite brilliant and moving pieces herein, especially Goli Taraqqi's A House in Heaven and The Shermiran, the latter which I found wonderful in its subtlety. The magico-realistic piece Crystal Pendants by Shahnoosh Parsipour infuses traces of Latin American genre defining themes.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews