Before she in turn put her head under the coverlet my mother said, “Thank God your uncle didn’t wake up, because if he had, he’d have torn you all to pieces.” Before my head was completely hidden under the coverlet I looked across at the clock on the wall it was ten to three in the afternoon. Layli and her brother ran off to their house and my mother drove me into the cellar and under the coverlet, threatening me as she did so. I’ve no idea how long we’d been staring at each other when suddenly my mother appeared standing over us with a little multi-thonged whip in her hand. A pair of wide black eyes looked back at me. And then I happened to catch Layli’s eye. As on every day, we settled down quietly to our games and conversation in the shade of a big walnut tree. Our two houses had been built within one big enclosure and there was no wall between them. Layli, my uncle’s daughter, and her little brother had been waiting in the main garden for us for half an hour. I’d no choice but to leave her and I tiptoed out alone. In waiting for my father to go off, my poor little sister had fallen asleep herself. When my father’s snores became audible I stuck my head out from under the coverlet and glanced at the clock on the wall. But on that day, as on every other afternoon, we were just waiting for my father to fall asleep so that we could go into the yard to play. In the savage heat of Tehran an afternoon siesta was compulsory for all the children. That day, as on every day, they had compelled us-meaning me and my sister-by force and threats and a few golden promises for the evening to go into the cellar in order to sleep. ![]() The bitterness and longing I’ve been through since have often made me wonder whether if it had been the twelfth or the fourteenth of August things would have turned out differently. One hot summer day, to be precise, one Friday the thirteenth of August, at about a quarter to three in the afternoon, I fell in love. “The translation is so sensitive to the author’s tone and to the levels of language used by the characters that the Western reader, unfamiliar with Iran, needs only a minimum of help to enjoy and appreciate both the comic and serious aspects of the book.” ![]() “My Uncle Napoleon gives the reader an amusing, satirical picture of life among the privileged and their servants in Tehran at the beginning of World War II.” In this English version, much of the reader’s enjoyment comes from the outstanding quality of the translation.” “The farcical plot dashes along at a rapid pace and there is never a dull stretch. “Readers can gain a more balanced impression of Iran from perusing this novel, which looks at life from the kind of humorous perspective few Westerners may associate with the current regime in that country.” “It is so surely told, so funny, true, and ultimately heart-rending, it’s absolutely clear why My Uncle Napoleon is loved in its homeland.” “My Uncle Napoleon is a surprising novel, a raunchy, irreverent, hilarious farce wrapped around a core of quiet sorrow.” ![]() “My Uncle Napoleon should leave properly adjusted American readers desperate for more of this howlingly funny - not to mention tender, salacious and magical - Iranian import.” “A giddily uproarious mixture of farce and slapstick.” “An uproarious and endearing Iranian novel… one of the most entertaining books we’re likely to see this year.” Dick Davis’ superb English translation has not only captured the uproarious humor of the original but has also caught the delicate, underlying vibrancy of the Persian. In 1976 it was turned into a television series and immediately captured the imagination of the whole nation-its story became a cultural reference point and its characters national icons. First published in Iran in the early 1970s, the novel became an all-time best-seller. But most of all it is a very enjoyable, often side-splitting read that you wish did not have to end. It is also a social satire, a lampooning of the widespread Iranian belief that foreigners (particularly the British) are responsible for events that occurs in Iran. But the young narrator’s delicate and pure love for his cousin Layli is constantly jeopardized by an unforgettable cast of family members and the hilarious mayhem of their intrigues and machinations. Set in a garden in Tehran in the early 1940s, where three families live under the tyranny of a paranoid patriarch, My Uncle Napoleon is a rich, comic and brilliantly on-target send-up of Iranian society. “The existence in Persian literature of a full-scale, abundantly inventive comic novel that involves a gallery of varied and highly memorable characters, not to mention scenes of hilarious farcical mayhem, may come as a surprise to a Western audience used to associating Iran with all that is in their eyes dour, dire and dreadful.” (From the Preface)
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