Ron Leshem
Israel: Kinneret Zmora Bitan
Best seller since publication September 2009
350 pages
This intoxicating coming of age tale revolves around Kami, a young man who abandons the port city of his youth for the bright lights of Teheran, where he falls in love with a daring and beautiful race car driver. Their love leads him to underground parties in the metropolis, to forbidden drugs, music and desire.
In the strange building owned by his aunt, an actress whose star has dimmed, he befriends a tough and elderly disgraced judge, a blood-thirsty cat and a shy homosexual with a dangerous yen for men in uniform.
When Kami acquires a computer, the fragile balance in the building shifts out of control. The horizons of the Internet beckon to each of the reclusive tenants, with the allure of the freedom that they are denied outside, where the names of the streets are constantly being changed and the walls bear down with pronouncements of the Fathers of the Revolution.
From the black market, where you can buy everything that is forbidden, to the public squares where adulterous women are executed; from the towering skyscrapers to the villages hidden from sight; between euphoria and paranoia, a portrait of modern Iran is exposed, rife with contradictions, where the horror is addictive but the taste of freedom is immeasurably more so. A place more distant than the moon, yet with a magnetism that controls the ebb and flow of the heart.
Niloofar is a bold and surprising creation that dares to sail the imagination beyond the black veil and return with enchanting characters, richly-laden images, beauty and pain. It is a reflection from there that illuminates us equally over here.
This is a literary achievement of striking color and expression, and it transports the reader into a totally different and fabulously credible reality
