My Father's Notebook
Published on 4. June 2009
336 pages
978-1-84767-633-7 (ISBN)
Description
When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate, deaf son of a Persian nobleman, travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael - a political dissident in exile - attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script . . . and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.
My Father's Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.
My Father's Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.
Reviews / Votes
beautifully evoked in often touching and amusing detail My Father's Notebook is an intriguing, complex and often playful novel that deserves attention * * Scotland on Sunday * * With seamlessly interwoven quotations from Persian and Dutch literature, deft storytelling and affectionate humour, he offers the reader buoyancy as well as weight My Father's Notebook is a gift to English readers * * The Independent * * A moving elegy for a lost father and homeland, but also a voice raised against all forms of repression... My Father's Notebook reads like a detective story: information is withheld so that we gradually discover the background to Ishmael's exile. * * The Guardian * *More details
Series
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Canongate Books
Product notice
Reflowable
File size
4,12 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-84767-633-7 (9781847676337)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Kader Abdolah
My Father's Notebook
Book
04/2007
Canongate Books
€33.61
Article exhausted; check different version
Persons
Kader Abdolah (a pen name created in memoriam to friends who died under the persecution of the current Iranian regime) was born in Iran in 1954. While a student of physics in Tehran, he joined a secret leftist party that fought against the dictatorship of the shah and the subsequent dictatorship of the ayatollahs. Abdolah wrote for an illegal journal and clandestinely published two books in Iran. In 1988, at the invitation of the United Nations, he arrived in the Netherlands as a political refugee. He now writes in Dutch and is the author of novels, short stories and works of non-fiction.
Susan Massotty is a translator of Dutch into English. She has translated works by Kader Abdolah and Margriet de Moor, as well as Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. She won the Vondel Prize for My Father's Notebook.
Susan Massotty is a translator of Dutch into English. She has translated works by Kader Abdolah and Margriet de Moor, as well as Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. She won the Vondel Prize for My Father's Notebook.
Content
- Intro
- Book I: The Cave
- The Cave
- The Train
- A Wife
- The Well
- Isfahan
- A New Wife
- Book II: New Ground
- New Ground
- Moving
- A Woman In A Hat
- Mossadegh
- The Tuti
- Golden Bell
- On Your Own Two Feet
- Giant Shadows
- The Dutch Dunes
- Jamileh
- The Mahdi
- Akbar No Longer Wants To Be Deaf And Dumb
- The Days Rush Past
- Mount Damavand
- The End Of The Road
- A Christmas Tree In Akbar's Notebook
- Book III: The Cave
- A New Road
- Footprints
- The Cuneiform Notebook
- Glossary
- Acknowledgments
