Iranian literature is among the richest in the world, with a poetic tradition stretching back over a thousand years. These books deal specifically with Tehran and modern Iran — novels, memoirs, and one graphic novel that collectively give more access to contemporary Iranian life than any guidebook.
The Blind Owl — Hedayat's short, hallucinatory novel — written in 1936, first published in India to avoid Iranian censorship — is the defining work of Iranian modernist fiction: the confession of a narrator who may be insane, dreaming, or dead, obsessed with a woman he may have killed or imagined, in a Tehran that shifts between the ancient and the contemporary without distinguishing between them. It is not a comfortable book, but it is unmistakably Iranian in its themes — the weight of the past, the unreliability of identity, the presence of death. Hedayat died by suicide in his apartment in Paris in 1951, aged 48. The book is banned in Iran.
My Uncle Napoleon — First published in 1973 and adapted into Iran's most popular television serial ever made (before the revolution), My Uncle Napoleon is a comic novel narrated by a boy coming of age in an extended Tehran family dominated by his uncle — a pompous, paranoid man who believes himself to be a reincarnation of Napoleon and sees British conspiracies in every misfortune. It is a gentle and affectionate satire of the Iranian character and a portrait of middle-class Tehran in the mid-20th century: the family compound with its garden, the wedding ceremonies, the intrigues of relatives.
The book remains immensely popular in Iran (despite being periodically banned), partly because the character of Uncle Napoleon resonates deeply — the grandiose self-image, the conspiracy thinking, and the absolute certainty of persecution are recognisable across Iranian social history.
Persepolis — Satrapi's graphic memoir of growing up in Tehran before, during, and after the Islamic Revolution is probably the most widely read account of modern Iranian life in the West. The black-and-white drawings are both simple and precise: the transformation of the city's social life after 1979 — the enforced veiling, the closure of wine shops, the disappearance of mixed social spaces — is shown through the eyes of a child who does not yet understand it, which makes it more affecting than a political analysis would be.
The second volume follows her years in Austria and her return to Tehran as a young adult. Together they constitute an extraordinary portrait of a city in radical transformation and of what it costs a person to navigate that transformation.
Reading Lolita in Tehran — Nafisi's memoir describes the years she spent teaching English literature at the University of Tehran before and after the revolution, and the secret reading group she ran in her apartment in the 1990s — seven women meeting weekly to read Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and James, books that the Islamic Republic found variously immoral or imperialist. The book is both a portrait of Tehran's intellectual life and a meditation on what literature does for people who cannot live freely. The descriptions of the city — the architecture, the street life, the checkpoints — are those of someone who loved Tehran deeply and left it reluctantly.
The Colonel — Dowlatabadi's novel — published in German translation in 2009 but not allowed to be published in Iran — is the most ambitious Iranian novel about the revolution and its aftermath. Set over a single rainy night in a small Iranian city, a retired military colonel recounts his children's fates under both the Shah's regime and the Islamic Republic, each having been killed by one government or the other. The writing is dense, allusive, and deeply rooted in Persian literary tradition.
It is not an easy book, but for anyone who wants to understand the tragedy of Iranian history in the 20th century — the way that successive authoritarian systems consumed the people who believed in them — it is essential reading. Dowlatabadi is considered by many Iranian literary critics to be the greatest living novelist in the Persian language.