Short stories
مومیا و عسل
Shahriar Mandanipour · 1996
Synopsis
Several stories, including the one that gives the book its title. During the ceremony on the seventh day after the grandfather's death, the youngest of three brothers, back from abroad, sees a viper with golden scales coil around the bitter orange tree in the courtyard and vanish into its branches; that evening, the father summons his three sons to the dead man's room. The creature has haunted for generations the old family house, ruled with an iron hand by the patriarch, where opium smoke drifts and where a snake hunter was once found dead in a cellar.
Context
The collection appeared in Tehran from Niloufar in 1375 of the Persian calendar, that is, in 1996 or early 1997, and was reissued in 2001. The title story, in which the layout of the ancestral house governs the narrative, was translated into English by Sara Khalili, first in the journal Words without Borders in 2010, then in Seasons of Purgatory, a collection of nine stories by the author published in New York in 2022. English-language critics have read in it a family stifled by tradition and wealth, and in the viper the figure of an inherited fear.
Who it is for
A collection of short stories in Persian, in a very carefully worked language. It helps to know that the stories often leave their endings open, and that the house counts as much as the characters.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the most noted books its author wrote in Persian, and reissued in Tehran in 2001.