The Blind Owl

"Sadeq Hedayat wrote his first long story, The Blind Owl , in the 1920s, thus becoming the first important Iranian novelist. The codes of the “occidental” novel were almost unknown in Iran and Hedayat was the first to play with them in an Iranian context. The Blind Owl is not only a great novella, dark and disturbing like an opium vision, an erotic nightmare, it is also the first example of this kind of fiction in the Persian language—something like a fantastic tale. Its originality comes precisely from its narrator. We don’t know his name, but he’s telling us about himself, his intoxication, his cruel love story. Somehow we understand that he’s deceiving us, that he is probably out of his mind. Or maybe not…. Maybe the horrors he’s telling are true. In a way, Hedayat’s narrator was an inspiration for the creation of Franz’s voice in Compass ."