Hans Roosli, a young Swiss journalist on hisfirst assignment a broad, comes to Iran inOctober, 1971, to cover the Shah’s celebrationof 2,500 years of the nation’s monarchy: an occasion thattriggers events leading to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.There he meets a thirteen year-old girl of privilege, Donya,whose growing fascination for him impels him to return tocover the revolution until his … arrest and imprisonment. Onehis release six years later, she is nowhere to be found.The tale of his subsequent search for Donya is anodyssey that takes Hans around the globe until, decadeslater, they are finally reunited under strange and unexpected circumstances.
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Of all Donne Raffat’s pseudonymous, wonderfully-informed, six books about Iran –
historical romances when not tributes to Iran’s writers and historical figures from Persia’s pre-Revolutionary role as the cultural Mecca of the East – I chose Chimeras to read and review.
Fascinated by the symbol of the Chimera, a mythological fire-breathing female beast with the head of a lion, body of a goat, and serpent’s tail, I soon realized as I plunged into the text on Kindle that it also signifies the unrequited longing for a thing or a person that may be sought, hoped and yearned for, but never attained.
This is what the author intended as his protagonist’s chimera: a mesmerizing vision of a schoolgirl in the flesh, met on the wing as he prepares to flee Tehran after being released from prison. She is Donya, reminiscent of a houri, or virgin beauty, companion to the faithful, according to Islam. She is presented alongside her double, another equally-mesmerizing school girl, his friend Emil’s sister, Sonya.
Their name wordplay is repeated in their doubling as twins. Which one is real? The poor Swiss foreign journalist is dazzled by their beauty, can’t tell them apart. If he can’t trust his senses, why should we trust him as the narrator? Yet 286 pages later, there is no doubt that we have fallen under his spell. Just as Hans has fallen under Donya’s. And so we enjoy the book as a chimera too.
This opening image is the first of Raffat’s numerous sleights-of-hand involving his romantically-impressionable Hans Roosli, 25, on assignment in pre-Revolutionary Iran. Happily or not so happily, depending upon one’s point of view, he falls under the chimera’s spell and revels in his longing for her for the better part of the book.
Raffat is an author who’s clearly lived through the Iranian Revolution as an Iranian citizen – he may have even been imprisoned as a journalist-spy like his alter-ego Hans. Which could account for his shadow existence under a pseudonym? His account covers the injustice dealt fellow-Iranian writer Salman Rushdie, in hiding in self-imposed exile due to fatwa, the death decree issued by Khomeini, for Rushdie’s unreserved criticism of Iran in his controversial novel The Satanic Verses.
Raffat is an accomplished literary acrobat, lulling us like a classic Persian storyteller with a frame story like “One Thousand and One Nights.” Hans’ quest for Donya reminds us that this tale of love, a hero’s mission, effectively covers for his real subject: what happened to the people and nation of Iran during and after Monarch Pahlavi’s overthrow in 1979.
Raffat’s first-person account of the three cycles (“Illusions,” “Delusions,” and Phantoms”) of his decades-long search for Donya is natural and apt. The master storyteller’s flowing prose seems like the murmurings of a trusted confidant. In this way, he introduces us to all the horror of the Revolution. Chatting us up, he reports his account of what happened via Hans. We believe him. Why shouldn’t we? He’s a journalist.
What finally sticks with us? Is it the romantic thread connecting the few plot moments when Hans reaches out to Donya and seems on track? Or is it the chronicle, seen through the narrator’s eyes, about how Iran became what it is today?
Perhaps the clue is contained in the image displayed on the book’s cover –
a silhouette of a beautiful woman, a genie, emerging from Aladdin’s Lamp. She rises to the stratosphere, keeping company with creatures of the sky.
Is that a dagger in her right hand, upraised, ready to plunge?
I love this book.
EH Davis, author of My Wife’s Husband: A Family Thriller