Novel
The Patient Stone
سنگ صبور
Sadegh Chubak · 1966
Synopsis
In a half-ruined house in Shiraz live tenants: Ahmad Aqa, a young schoolteacher who would like to write; Gowhar, who works as a prostitute to feed her little boy, Kakol Zari, and her former servant, Jahansoltan, bedridden in what remains of the stable; Belqeys, neglected by an opium-addicted husband, who desires Ahmad Aqa, himself in love with Gowhar. Everything unravels the day Gowhar disappears, and Ahmad Aqa must look after those she leaves behind. Alone in his house, a moralist, Seyf ol-Qalam, dreams of purging the city of debauchery.
Context
The novel appeared in Tehran in 1966, three years after the author's first. It takes its title from a folk tale published by Sadegh Hedayat in 1941: the stone of patience listens to the sorrows entrusted to it until it bursts. It has no omniscient narrator, five characters giving their names to the chapters, and opens with an earthquake in Shiraz in 1934. Its publication caused a great stir: its spoken language, reproduced as closely as possible, and its crude scenes earned it as much praise as attack, some seeing in it nothing but pornography. Mohammad Reza Ghanoonparvar put it into English in 1989.
Who it is for
A novel in spoken Persian, often crude, with several voices. One should know that each chapter bears the name of the character who speaks, and that the thread is pieced together from one voice to the next.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by Parviz Natel-Khanlari as the best Persian fiction since The Blind Owl, and by others as its author's masterpiece.