Wood on Censoring An Iranian Love Story

A few weeks back I mentioned Censoring An Iranian Love Story by the Iranian writer Shahriar Mandanipour. It’s a novel that depicts the difficulty of writing a love story in Iran, both for the challenge of getting two lovers together in such a society and for the legal challenge of getting said book past the censors.

James Wood reviews in the current New Yorker and discusses some of Mandanipour’s formal tricks for depicting this on the page:

“Censoring an Iranian Love Story” is not simply prohibited by censorship but made by it. For Mandanipour, the censor is a kind of co-writer of the book, and he appears often in this novel, under the alias of Porfiry Petrovich (the detective who chases Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov). We see him squabbling with Mandanipour, chatting to another Iranian writer, plotting alternative stories for Dara and Sara, striking out offensive phrases, and finally falling in love with Sara. He is a heavy presence in the novel, and is both creator and critic; the writer is always anticipating the imagination of prohibition even as he tries to outwit it. Even more interesting, the writer, in this situation, becomes his characters; he wants what they want. Their freedom is bound up with his. This interdependency does provocative things to the relation of fiction to reality. On the one hand, fiction becomes more real—real enough to strike lines through. On the other hand, fiction becomes more fictional—multiple writers (the author and his censors) are making up a collective story as they go along, improvising, cutting, editing, bargaining with each other. One of the great successes of this book is how thoroughly it persuades the reader that a novel about censorship could not help also being a novel about fiction-making; and it thus brings a political gravity to a fictive self-consciousness sometimes abused by the more weightless postmodernism.

Since the official love story can barely get off the ground, Mandanipour supplies the unofficial version, in an essayistic running commentary that often displaces the official tale for pages on end. (The formal love story appears on the page in bold type, the authorial interpolations in roman.) This commentary, in which Mandanipour writes as himself, entertainingly informs the reader about the riskier aspects of the two protagonists, the history of censorship in Iran, the revolution of 1979, and so on. . . .

Gimmickry would seem to be the main danger of a book like this, and Wood seems to think Censoring runs far afoul of that

it is both unaffecting and heavy-handed when, on the next page, Dara grabs the author by the throat and complains, “You shouldn’t have written me like this. You shouldn’t have written me as browbeaten and pathetic. . . . You wrote me like this to pass your story through censorship.” Meanwhile, a hunchback from “The Thousand and One Nights” is making regular appearances, and Mandanipour tries to spice up the love story with a rival suitor, named Sinbad. The book’s lowest moment is reached when Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich, the clerk from the story “The Overcoat,” turns up in Tehran, and asks Mandanipour, who is standing on a street with Mr. Petrovich, “Have you seen the thief who stole my cloak?” Even Robert Coover might itch to delete such a scene from one of his students’ fictions. There are some good forms of censorship.

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