Books
Shida Bazyar (translated by Ruth Martin)
The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran
“These are strange times, my dear, they smell your breath to see if you have spoken of love.” In Shida Bazyar’s The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, an old Iranian woman recites verses of Persian poetry as she feeds forbidden books to a growing flame.
Years later, this small act of resistance lingers in her daughter-in-law Nahid’s mind as she pieces together a new life in West Germany. It’s among other memories she revisits before she rises to take care of her two children. How the past haunts and informs the present is Bazyar’s calm focus as she traces the lives of one family through four decades of change and revolutions in Iran and Germany.
In four sections spanning from 1979 to 2009, the novel moves through brief periods of four lives: the hopes of Behsad, a revolutionary fighter; the fears of Nahid, a new immigrant mother; the anxieties of Laleh, an exiled daughter on a visit to a distant homeland; and the numbness of Mo, a son torn up inside by his parents’ grief and longing to return home.
In Iran 1979, Behsad is devoted to the communist cause, smuggling flyers and fighting alongside comrades. In West Germany 1989, Nahid despairs at the way words lose their beauty when translated from Farsi to German. In 1999, Laleh is uncomfortable in her budding body on a brief trip back to Tehran, where the days are raucous and dusty and the nights are quiet. In 2009, Mo watches a new revolution unfold in his parents’ homeland from his laptop screen. As each section is in its own distinct voice and carefully attuned to the zeitgeist of the passing decades, there is a sense they were plucked from four broader, richer novels. Together, they give a touching portrait of how the sweep of history shapes one family.
In Ruth Martin’s lilting translation of the German novel, Bazyar’s lyrical sentences exude a deep sensitivity to the “permanent pain” of the relentless yearning for home. Infused with the small, painful details of the dislocated immigrant existence, Bazyar’s stories strike at the aching heart of exile. A pulsing longing for a better future lingers from its first page to its last.
A quietly beautiful exploration of the trauma of losing one’s homeland to a savage regime, the novel is testament to how hope and the revolutionary spirit endure in the face of crushing tyranny, how courage cannot be fully stamped out. It lies dormant, awaiting a time when it can again ignite new acts of bravery, new waves of revolution.
Scribe, 288pp, $29.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran".
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