Teeming with surrealistic imagery and potent symbolism, The blind owl by Sadegh Hedayat is considered an important piece of Iranian literature that packs a hefty punch. Its language is as lovely as a persian rug and just as unreal. The subject matter is murderous and darkly decadent, so much so that I found it to be bone chilling/ heart in your throat kind of disturbing. It details a man’s mad obsession with a dead woman, whose sanity is quite visibly peeling away at the edges. It couppies the unique space between the surreal and the ambiguous, and the writing is almost feverish at times, as if told in an opium induced haze. His obsession with death is a monstrous, pulsating thing that he has no control over, which ultimately leads him to murder and unthinkable violence.
On the surface it is a tale of doomed love, but as the story progresses the reader is confronted with the full force of the subject matter. Hedayat casts an observant eye over the landscape of the life of a man who falls victim to his circumstances, whose existence is being drained in the sieve of life’s brutal moments. Interestingly enough, this book is banned in Iran due its tendency to induce suicide among teenagers.
*I felt that ever since the world had been the world, so long as I had lived, a corpse, cold, inanimate and still, had been with me in a dark room.*
*Whenever I smoked opium my ideas acquired grandeur, subtlety, magic and sublimity and I moved in another sphere beyond the boundaries of the ordinary world. My thoughts were freed from the weight of material reality and soared towards an empyrean of tranquillity and silence. I felt as though I was borne on the wings of a golden bat and ranged through a radiant, empty world with no obstacle to block my progress.*
Hedayatat’s writing style is visceral and relentlessly beautiful, piling sensation upon sensation, scarcely allowing the reader to pause and draw breath. The imagery is so disturbingly whimsical as to haunt you in your dreams, and the whole thing reads like a fever dream, with no discernible beginning or end. Similar to how when you dream at night your thoughts are askew; free of sense or restriction. His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Gibran’s,(in terms of language and creative expression) but it is in a category of its own.
*Her lips were full and halfopen as though they had broken away only a moment before from a long, passionate kiss and were not yet sated. Her face, pale as the moon, was framed in the mass of her black, dishevelled hair and one strand clung to her temple*.
Not only does he write with the violent force that the themes of his work demand, but he also fearlessly explores taboo regions of depression, drug addiction, suicide, spirituality and the shadowy hues of life in which we tend to lose ourselves at times. It certainly has a powerful and disturbing effect on the reader, for it hit me with the force of a thousand bricks. The philosophy in the story is awfully absorbing and sparks a bit of existential crisis in the reader. At once strange and sublime, The blind owl certainly lives up to its reputation as a ‘cursed book’, inspiring many a generations with its monstrous subject matter, philosophy and infernal sort of lyricism. It was ugly, outlandish and extremely disquieting that reading it felt like a fever breaking. It will crawl into your veins and make you sick for days, but that’s the beauty of it.
*My clothes were torn and soiled from top to bottom with congealed blood. Two blister-flies were circling about me, and tiny white maggots were wriggling on my coat. And on my chest I felt the weight of a woman’s dead body. …*
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