Bookworm, no. 132
Nirris Nagendrarajah reviews Sirous Houshmand’s “The Darkest Night Brings Longer Days.” David Venn on Sharon Bala’s “Good Guys.” Inside the January/February issue.
These Four Walls
The Darkest Night Brings Longer Days: Surviving War and Iran’s Evin Prison
Sirous Houshmand
McGill-Queen’s University Press
234 pages, softcover and ebook
Sentenced to Tehran’s Evin Prison in 1986, the industrial engineer and secular activist Sirous Houshmand was often shuttled to interrogation rooms blindfolded. Once, however, he managed to catch a glimpse of his surroundings. “The walls, marked with the passage of time, bore witness to the many stories,” he writes in The Darkest Night Brings Longer Days. “What if each mark could tell its story of what happened?”
Born in Tehran, Houshmand immigrated to Orange, California, in the early 1960s, when he was twelve. As a young man, he grew increasingly aware of state-sanctioned injustice, as seen with the Kent State shootings in May 1970: “My mere presence in such a volatile period was transforming.” In August 1978, he returned to Iran “to break away from the status quo.” He worked in a factory, and when conflict with Iraq erupted into “a full-fledged war,” he volunteered at a hospital. (In one notable section, he recalls helping patients and staff cross the Karkheh River, away from the advancing army.) Later, his factory colleagues elected him as their union representative. This drew the ire of Ayatollah Khomeini’s new regime. In 1984, Houshmand left his job, but he continued his activism around labour rights, feminism, and federalism, by encouraging what he describes vaguely as “constructive discourse within political groups.” But then he was arrested.
With its rhetorical questions and protracted history lessons, the book proves most engrossing in the details of Houshmand’s three-year imprisonment, as when he describes an ant crossing his cell as “a spectacle tantamount to meditation.”
—Nirris Nagendrarajah
Guilt Trip
Good Guys
Sharon Bala
McClelland & Stewart
376 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook
When the movie star Dallas Hayden visits a clinic in the fictional Latin American country of Santa Rosa, she is taken with Maria, a baby with a club foot. The facility is run by Children of the World, a nearly bankrupt charity headquartered in Toronto. Its communications director, Claire Talbot, entertains a proposal from the actor: broker an adoption, then receive a hefty donation. Despite the father’s objections, young Maria winds up in California, and the charity accepts $2 million.
Claire tries to justify the adoption to herself. After all, she left a lucrative job protecting the reputations of corrupt companies to do more meaningful work. Her colleague Anya Muller also explains away the arrangement. She championed the Santa Rosa project and wants to secure its future. Neither of them can afford to fail, so they become complicit in what is essentially a kidnapping. By the end, opportunistic greed infects a righteous journalist writing about the scandal as well as corporate sponsors.
When Claire’s ex-husband takes their children to India for six weeks, she feels that “nothing tangible” connects her to her kids. She wonders, “How long before the statute of limitations on biology expired?” It’s one of several lofty questions Sharon Bala asks in Good Guys. What does it mean, the novel ultimately asks, to give a child a “better life”?
—David Venn
Inside the January/February Issue
“With generations of bilateral norms torn asunder, a century’s worth of shared institutional infrastructure in doubt, and a relationship that no longer seems special or mutual, Canadians would do well to take a breather and peer into the past, not only to figure out how we got here but to plot the way ahead.” Jeffrey F. Collins reviews three books about Canada’s tenuous relationship with the United States.
Spencer Morrison goes on a journey with Ken Wilson’s Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road and Merilyn Simonds’s Walking with Beth: Conversations with My Hundred-Year-Old Friend.
“My copy moved with me from Manitoba to Ontario, from New York to Ohio. I never once cracked it. Every flash of its cover sparked an internal klaxon: Here is this serious book about your serious people! I began to resent it. Diasporic guilt, you can’t win over me!” Casey Plett finally gets around to Sandra Birdsell’s The Russländer.
And much more!