Two "Reviews"

I haven't posted in a while because the thought of figuring out what to write about Cynthia Ozick's Heir to the Glimmering World depressed me. (As did the book, for that matter.) The book has some wry humor and is fascinatingly unsympathetic. During our book club conversation, we also decided that Ozick provided a troubling commentary on the alienation of people. If alienation and a cast of exiles is your thing, check it out. As for me, I preferred the book that it almost reminded me of, Muriel Spark's A Long Way from Kensington.

Enough said.

Moving onto my most recent read, Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad. This was much more enjoyable, largely because it seemed more human. Azadeh was someone I almost understood (although at my age she was a correspondent for Time magazine). She is probing, and catty, and ridiculous, and thoughtful, feeling her way for an identity that fits. I never questioned my national identity, blissfully American - in fact envious of my friends whose family cultures included more that a null set of commercialized values and traditions. In many ways, I was very lucky, unlike Azadeh, who discovers that - having grown up between two worlds - she will not find a single place where she "belongs". But everyone knows the feeling of not belonging (see Ozick above), and so even when the memoir is utterly foreign, it is also not.

My best friend in fourth grade had an American journalist father and a Persian mother. She was born the year of the revolution. That didn't mean anything to me at the time, but now I am old enough to wonder about their lives. The mother - how did she suffer the loss of her homeland? In Thousand Oaks was she close enough to an emigre community? Would she have lived and raised her daughter in America regardless? And my friend herself - we grew apart and moved in very different circles by high school. I saw her clique as pretty shallow, and I mourned the loss of my funny, brilliant friend. But was she struggling to carve out her own identity, embracing the American, the Persian, the Iranian, the Valley Girl?

There's been a spate of interest in women and Iran of late: Reading Lolita in Tehran (read my review here), Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels, a recent episode of KQED Forum, and more. And from it, I believe that we better understand Iran and Iranians, at least those of the diaspora, who so often go home. But - and perhaps this is good - we are no closer to predicting what the future holds for Iran.