The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

"Gladly. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is set in the decade following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. It’s narrated by a ghost, a dead character who floats above the scene, a 13-year-old girl whose family are forced to leave their home in Tehran. There is this sense of the living and the dead mingling in this novel, that the relationship between the two worlds is quite porous. The dead and living move amongst each other. It’s a novel that is situated at a febrile fault line in Iranian culture, between the period previous to the revolution, a period in which this family, at least, lived a relatively peaceful life. And then the immediate turmoil and bloodshed and violence of the revolution and then the subsequent regime. It’s a book, for all of that violence and turbulence, which is touched by the sense of possibility and magic. Azar’s writing has sometimes been compared to the magical realists of Latin America, and there are some interesting comparisons there. But I think perhaps the deeper root of this book is the relationship that is has with Persian and Middle Eastern storytelling traditions, including One Thousand and One Nights and Persian mythology, particularly the figure of the jin and the whole wonderful, fantastical tradition of spirits that move amongst the living, and play tricks on the living, and have a kind of impish fun with their mortal counterparts. “There is this sense of the living and the dead mingling; that the relationship between the two worlds is porous” This is a book that has immense range. It requires, I think, immense precision to pull off a novel like this. Azar is clearly a really masterful and exacting writer because there is this very effervescent style, which is full of magic, but it’s also historically rooted fiction which chronicles this hugely important transitional moment in Iranian culture. It manages to not shy away from the violence of that world, yet fills you with a kind of wonder at the richness of this culture and the tenderness in this sort of a ghostly family. We all were so moved by it and found it just an extraordinary immersion in an historic moment, which situated us in a place where you could look back right into the depths of Iranian and Persian and Middle Eastern culture, and look right up to the present and see how that big shift around the revolution has continued to play out. I know probably as much as you do about that. I can only really speculate, but I believe they still live in Iran and there are some aspects to the book which are critical of the violence of the revolution. This is a book that doesn’t pull any punches from representing that flashpoint in Iranian history with real exactitude. Certainly, there’s nothing been said publicly by the translator. So we just have to respect that. In terms of our judgment of the book, we thought that the translator did an exceptional job in terms of capturing the different registers that Azar is working within: the mythic, the interior domestic scenes she conjures, the very stark and brutal scenes of violence and war. It’s a translation that has a kind of fleet-footedness and obedience, but it’s also occasionally just extremely arresting and shocking in places. So, whoever the translator is, they’ve done a marvellous job."