Booked on Sundays

Episode 40: Blind Owl

Booked on Sundays

Show Notes

For our final book of our series, we've ended on a bit of messy one. But as per usual with book clubs, sometimes the best reads are reads you disagree on, reads that are chaotic, reads you don't quite understand? And Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat is all of those things. We get into our true feelings on novellas, imagery as patterns, and pose the question "to what end?".

As a reminder, this season all our episodes contain Spoilers!! So if you haven't read it, and want to - turn back! Else, listen in and we will give you enough of a synopsis to get the picture. Have your own thoughts? Let us know (we dare you to)! Submit a footnote!

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Blind Owl book blurb: Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In first person, the narrator offers a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the exact same scene on the covers of pen an old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful woman in black who offers him a water lily. In a one-page transition, the reader finds the narrator covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrest him. In part two, readers glimpse the grim realities that unlock the mysteries of the first part. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat’s conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche.

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