Censoring an Iranian Love Story
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Narrated by:
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Sunil Malhotra
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Naila Azad
About this listen
From one of Iran’s most acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers, his first novel to appear in English - a dazzlingly inventive work of fiction that opens a revelatory window onto what it’s like to live, to love, and to be an artist in today’s Iran.
The novel entwines two equally powerful narratives. A writer named Shahriar - the author’s fictional alter ego - has struggled for years against the all-powerful censor at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Now, on the threshold of 50, tired of writing dark and bitter stories, he has come to realize that the “world around us has enough death and destruction and sorrow". He sets out instead to write a bewitching love story, one set in present-day Iran. It may be his greatest challenge yet.
Beautiful black-haired Sara and fiercely proud Dara fall in love in the dusty stacks of the library, where they pass secret messages to each other encoded in the pages of their favorite books. But Iran’s Campaign Against Social Corruption forbids their being alone together. Defying the state and their disapproving parents, they meet in secret amid the bustling streets, Internet cafés, and lush private gardens of Tehran.
Yet writing freely of Sara and Dara’s encounters, their desires, would put Shahriar in as much peril as his lovers. Thus we read not just the scenes Shahriar has written but also the sentences and words he’s crossed out or merely imagined, knowing they can never be published.
Laced with surprising humor and irony, at once provocative and deeply moving, Censoring an Iranian Love Story takes us unforgettably to the heart of one of the world’s most alluring yet least understood cultures. It is an ingenious, wholly original novel - a literary tour de force that is a triumph of art and spirit.
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On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
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A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Mr. Fox
- A Novel
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Carol Boyd
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently....
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A Great Novel, just Poor for Audio
- By James A. Dittes on 08-13-16
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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The Corpse Washer
- By: Sinan Antoon
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father's wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise.
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Gorgeous story with talented narration
- By N. Barnes on 03-11-18
By: Sinan Antoon
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The Association of Small Bombs
- By: Karan Mahajan
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family's television at a repair shop with their friend, Mansoor Ahmed, one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb - one of the many "small" bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world - detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.
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A tragedy of manners
- By jdukuray on 07-22-16
By: Karan Mahajan
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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
- By: Gabriel García Márquez
- Narrated by: Thom Rivera
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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On the eve of his 90th birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit - he has purchased hundreds of women - he asks a madam for her assistance. The 14-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to a master's work.
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-the consolation you have when you can't have Love
- By Darwin8u on 09-16-21
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Safely Home
- By: Randy Alcorn
- Narrated by: Steve Sever
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Abridged
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Here is a soul-stirring story of two college friends who reconnect after 20 years. One is living life apart from God, in comfortable corporate America; the other is living for Christ under intense persecution in China. This challenging book will convince readers to live in the light of eternity.
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Will this be the day that I die?
- By Johnny Excitement on 01-17-08
By: Randy Alcorn
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Amulet
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Adriana Sananes
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry", hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University.
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Read The Savage Detectives first
- By Alicia Grega on 12-05-13
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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House of Meetings
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison.
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Martin Amis at the height of his powers; wonderous
- By Todd on 06-16-15
By: Martin Amis
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City of Lies
- Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran
- By: Ramita Navai
- Narrated by: Sylvia Lisle
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In today's Tehran, intrigues abound and survival depends on an intricate network of falsehoods: mullahs visit prostitutes, local mosques train barely pubescent boys in crowd-control tactics, and cosmetic surgeons promise to restore girls' virginity. Navai paints an intimate portrait of those discreet recesses in a city where the difference between modesty and profanity, loyalty and betrayal, honor and disgrace is often no more than the believability of a lie.
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Impossible to Put Down
- By Leonard on 10-19-14
By: Ramita Navai
What listeners say about Censoring an Iranian Love Story
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Zygote
- 10-12-16
One of the most creative books to date!
What made the experience of listening to Censoring an Iranian Love Story the most enjoyable?
This book blew me away! I love the how the writer so skillfully tears the veil between his characters, his own process, and the craft of writing. The text is rich with cultural references and reflections on other iconic writers' contributions.
What other book might you compare Censoring an Iranian Love Story to and why?
I would describe this work as Vonnegutian style with a Persian flair. I love the Persian myths, imagery and poems are woven into the story. It also reminded me a great deal of the oppressive and futile atmosphere of "The Lives of Others."
Which character – as performed by Sunil Malhotra and Naila Azad – was your favorite?
Sara would have to be the favorite character representing women's struggles. She is the wisest and most grounded and also the most oppressed character for simply being a woman in the Islamic Republic. Women's Rights are well-highlighted in this book. Mr. Petrovich, in charge of censorship, is also quite intriguing in his ideology and omnipresence throughout the story.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
I wanted to take my time and listen to this story a little at a time. This is such an unusual and fascinating work and it deserves all your attention, not the type you listen to before bed. This book will not impress the average reader as one has to get stretched beyond anything they have read to be able to enjoy this book.
Any additional comments?
I highly recommend this book! The female narrator could have used better coaching in the Persian accent (she sounded like she was an Arab character), but overall the narration was good.
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18 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-06-17
Funny & tragic & triumphant
I listened to this straight through twice consecutively. It is a marvelous, rich and clever book the that draws upon Iran's rich literary history to depict the difficult lives of today's Iranians;creatives & ordinary people with ordinary wishes for love & belonging. Loved it more upon second reading.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-10-24
True true true
Honest comedy, love and familiar sense of imprisonment, I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed and think about it.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-18-17
long and boring
At first it seemed like we would gain interesting insights, and that was true, but then they were just repeated over and over. The story never seemed to go anywhere and in the end just seemed to stop. I figured out early on that we were supposed be looking for symbolic underlying meanings and perhaps they were flying over my head. It seemed to be one of those books for a lit class to analyze or for a jaded reviewer to enjoy because it was very creative in its approach. But for casual listening as we ride in our car not so much.
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Overall
- Linda
- 12-13-09
Censoring an Iranian Love Story
It is summed up using 1 word "AWFUL", do not waste you credits on this book.
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5 people found this helpful