Book review - Women Without Men
Shahrnush Parsipur, now 80, published her first full-length novel, The Dog and the Long Winter, in 1974. Her second, Touba and the Meaning of Night, about an Iranian woman defying convention, followed in 1989.
By then Parsipur had endured several periods of imprisonment in Iran, including in 1976 for protesting against the Shah’s secret police, and in 1981 after the Islamic Revolution. Following the publication of Women Without Men in 1990, she was detained for its references to virginity. She eventually fled into self-imposed exile in the US. Banned in her home country, the novella continued to circulate underground.
The oppression of women remains an incendiary subject in Iran, underscoring the continuing resonance of Women Without Men, which is described as a novel but reads like a series of linked stories. The book first appeared in English in the US, translated by Kamran Talattof and Jocelyn Sharlet, in 1998. Now Faridoun Farrokh’s translation, which dates back to 2011, has been longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize.
Partly set in August 1953, the month Prime Minister Mosaddegh was overthrown, the stories unfold against a backdrop of civil unrest. Five women, repressed, abandoned or humiliated by men, discover new, sometimes surreal, paths for themselves.
Societal expectations and the fear of spinsterhood weigh on Mahdokht, a former schoolteacher. While staying at her brother’s villa in Karadj, in the foothills of the Alborz mountains, she is horrified to discover the gardener and a 15-year-old maid having sex. Her vision of the maid’s fate if she returned home in disgrace — “The brothers would have ganged up on her and beaten her to death” — is a chilling reminder of how deeply ingrained misogyny was, and remains. I was reminded of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish-Iranian woman whose 2022 death in the custody of the morality police, after her arrest in relation to the country’s Islamic dress code, ignited nationwide protests and the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”.
Mahdokht’s brother sells his villa to Mrs Farrokhlaqa, a woman with ambitions to become someone of influence. After 32 years of marriage, she frees herself from a man who mocks her age and menopause by literally pushing back and inadvertently sending him tumbling down the stairs.
In her new home she finds that Mahdokht, a stranger to her, has transformed into a tree, rooting herself in the soil: “She was buried in the ground up to her knees, wearing a tattered dress, standing erect.” It’s an act of resistance; she can spread her seeds freely, without male intervention.
Twenty-eight-year-old Fa’iza is determined to marry Amir Khan, a “squarely built man . . . pushing forty”. She regularly visits his sister Munis, 10 years her senior, hoping he’ll propose, only for Amir to choose an 18-year-old “caring, dutiful, chaste” virgin instead. He believes that “women belong in the house. The outside is the world of men.”
When Munis takes her own life, she returns from the dead only for Amir to stab her for having “ruined the family reputation”. Yet Munis resurrects herself again. She travels with Fa’iza to Karadj, where they are invited to stay in Farrokhlaqa’s garden villa. They are joined by Zarrinkolah, a prostitute who leaves her brothel when her male customers appear to her headless.
Farrokhlaqa’s garden, tended by the “Kind Gardener”, a positive counterpoint to the other men in the book, offers a space for creativity and renewal. It provides a temporary sanctuary where the women can escape patriarchal constraints and imagine new identities for themselves.
Despite the bleakness of several vignettes, Parsipur delivers them with humour and a light touch. She blends magical realism with the heightened drama of a fairy tale, inverting familiar tropes: none of the characters find their prince, and Mahdokht and Farrokhlaqa reject cosy domesticity. Fa’iza and Munis are anxious about their reputations, yet when they are raped on the road to Karadj their violation is deemed inconsequential.
The book is deceptively simple on the surface, but our reading deepens with context. Parsipur’s irony and mysticism take some getting used to, but as the layers of misogyny are peeled back, the work’s full force emerges.
Orignally published by the Financial Times