The book of absent people

From Publishers Weekly Gentle, fanciful Rokni is 23, scion of the proud Heshmat Nezamis in Iran under the Shah. His physician father, dying of cancer, upbraids Rokni for wasting time painting and not getting a government post; he orders him to find Zia, a brother seized years ago by the secret police. Modarressi's first English novel (two have been published in Persian) is surreal and labyrinthine, capturing the plight of a cultivated family between two eras. While spectral gunfire and tear-gas drift from alleys strewn with Pepsi bottles, Rokni's kinsfolk cite ancient proverbs as guides for living, and the physician pores over classical tomes of herbal medicine. Clan snapshots and photos of war atrocities depict the new order; the past is beautifully summoned by Rokni's trancelike visions of Homayundokht, his dead stepmother, gazing at the stars or in a jewelled mirror like a Persian miniature. Although the novel sometimes reads like an awkward translation, it affords a firsthand glimpse of contemporary Tehran that will fascinate most readers. Modarressi, who practices child psychiatry in Baltimore, is married to novelist Anne Tyler. February 7Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The decline and death of an aging patriarch parallels the demise of Pahlavi Iran. At the request of his dying father, Rokni, the youngest son in a noble family, searches for his older brother, a revolutionary turned Islamic fundamentalist who disappeared ten years earlier. Rokni's quest takes him into mysteries of other lives, into the histories of those absent through death, madness, imprisonment, or exile. Yet the sense of mystery the novel arouses never quite satisfies; its histories are never quite recorded. Rokni, the narrator, is a painter, a "facemaker," but he ultimately leaves us with unfinished portraits. There are passionate people here, but their passions remain secrets only partially revealed. L.M. Lewis, Social Science Dept., Eastern Kentucky Univ., RichmondCopyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.