Novel
The Prince
شازده احتجاب
Houshang Golshiri · 1969
Synopsis
In an old mansion in a provincial town falling into ruin, Prince Khosrow Ehtejab, last scion of a fallen Qajar line, is dying of tuberculosis. He forces his servant to dress and laugh like the wife he has lost. The ancestors step out of the photographs hanging on the walls to speak to him: a grandfather and a great-grandfather who were despotic and cruel, a father who served the new masters and sent tanks against the crowd. The memories return in no order, and the dead have more life in them than he does.
Context
The novel appeared in Tehran in 1348 of the Persian calendar, that is 1969; the author called it the luckiest of his books. Everything in it passes through the memory of the prince and of those around him, in disordered fragments, and it has been read as the fall of a princely and despotic order. Bahman Farmanara made a film of it in 1974, with Jamshid Mashayekhi and Fakhri Khorvash, which was crowned at the Tehran festival. An English translation by Minoo Buffington appeared in an issue of the journal Literature East & West dated 1976, before that of James Buchan; Hossein Esmaïli and Jacques Selva translated it into French in 1990.
Who it is for
A short novel, about one hundred and sixty pages in English. It is worth knowing that it has no chronological thread: the episodes return in no order, like memories.
Prizes and reception
The novel that made its author famous, regarded as the most important of his work and translated into several languages.