My Uncle Napoleon

"To be honest, when I first heard about it I was really young. I hadn’t read the book but I had seen the TV adaptation, which was a series like “Friends”, though in a very different kind of way. It was very political and satirical, though not obviously so. I was too young to understand the very sensitive social commentary that was hidden in the day-to-day lives of the characters, but I still loved it. But after reading the book in my teens I discovered the depth of its explanations of the culture, mentalities, stereotypes and clichés of Iranian society. It showed the various mindsets – like the modern, the religious, and the Westernised. You know how in any TV series or book, each character is a prototype of a personality in the world? Well this book is the best example of that. It explains the whole society of Iran using a handful of people in the most understandable way, especially if you are not familiar with the culture. I have lent this book to friends, if only so as to make them understand what goes on in the Iranian mindset. It is such a clever satire and it is also a social, religious, and political commentary on the history of the Iranian people. It is much more truthful, perhaps, than an important scholarly or academic analysis. One thing it mocks is the idea that whatever happens inside Iran is due to the influence of the British or the West generally. There is a character who is becoming old, senile and paranoid, and he had been in the war, perhaps it was the First World War. He has now forgotten the real memories and turned them into a fantasised version. And he keeps retelling those memories in a way that is completely different from what happened. This character believes that a big part of whatever happened during his time in the military was influenced by the Brits, who didn’t want Iranians to have power, or for the Iranian government to be independent. He believes they sent spies and agents to control the events in Iran. This book was written decades ago, and yet you can still see that the idea is as rife as ever. Today the demonstrations in Iran are blamed on the British influence and the protestors are being accused of being agents of Britain or the US. BBC Persian broadcasting is accused of inciting people to cause disruptions on the streets. I hope neutrality is something the BBC is famous for worldwide. Yes. The old man’s favourite historical character is Napoleon . He quotes him all the time and thinks he was a great hero and warrior, mostly because he was an enemy of the British. So his younger relatives mockingly call him Napoleon behind his back. Even in his own family interactions, say when someone catches pneumonia, or a young cousin falls in love with his daughter and he doesn’t approve, he thinks everything is to do with the British. He has a very faithful gardener, who is exactly like Sancho Panza in Don Quixote, who approves of what he says and retells the same stories that never happened. Because there is some idiot applauding him he keeps on going. There is also a cousin who is foreign educated, speaks English and works for the foreign ministry. He thinks it’s such a joke that this old man has these ideas in his head. And there all sorts of other characters.It’s just really beautiful. One of the first programmes when BBC Persia was launched was “The Brits are Behind It”, although I can’t remember the exact translation in English, but it was also shown on English BBC. It was made by a British journalist who had married an Iranian woman and he interviewed one of the TV writers about how relevant it is that people still blame Britain, fifty years later."

"The book vies, curiously enough, with Sadegh Hedayat’s dark, brooding, existential novel The Blind Owl as the most significant book in 20th century Iran. That the two contenders for greatest Iranian novel of the 20th century should be so radically different may give you a sense of the complexity of the Iranian psyche. My Uncle Napoleon’ s humour runs very much to slapstick and farce. It is. It is not something that they are well known for outside of Iran, but Iranians have a very highly defined sense of the absurd. Perhaps having endured so many wars, revolutions and occupations has given them a gift for making farce out of tragedy. The cast of characters is massive, the plot absolutely unwieldy. The novel takes place within a large family compound in 1940s Tehran, and you can imagine all the jealousy and gossiping that goes on there. The reason it translated so well into a television series is because it has a soap opera feel. Certainly every Iranian of my parents’ generation knows the book, and even 30 or 40 years later they can still recount to you in loving detail their favourite scene from it or from the television series it inspired. The story is so messy and the humour can be really heavy-handed, yet Pezeshkzad makes such great fun of certain Iranian attitudes and traits. For example their predilection for flattery, hero worship and conspiracy theories. The main character, Uncle Napoleon, is so named because he is a great admirer of the Emperor Napoleon. He’s also completely delusional and thinks himself a hero of epic proportions. Fixated with the British, Uncle Napoleon believes that at any moment they will ambush him. So the book is all about Iran making fun of itself for its own kneejerk reaction to blame anything that goes wrong on foreigners. It’s also quite a funny send-up of the more universal, daily farce of family life."