Desolation
by Hossein Asgari
ISBN: 9781761154133
Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA
In 1988, civilian flight Iran Air 655 was shot down by U.S. Navy guided missiles while on its daily route from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. All 290 passengers and crew onboard were killed. An investigation into the incident found a succession of errors by the crew of USS Vincennes, concluding in two naval officers pressing at least 28 incorrect buttons to confirm the firing of the missiles. The U.S. government characterised the killings as an instance of “mistaken defensive action” – an error for which then-President George Bush awarded the captain with the Legion of Merit medal, as well as Navy Commendation medals for the two officers in their ‘heroic achievement’ of combat systems management (1).
The tragedy of IR655 is unknown to most outside of Iran, including the narrator of Hossein Asgari’s Desolation. In this frame narrative, a fiction writer in an Adelaide café is accosted by a stranger insistent on him retelling his story of “truth”. The stranger, Amin – though that may not be his real name – knows the downing of IR655 intimately. It is his centre; the point from which his life pivots. Amin’s brother, Hamid, was one of the 290 passengers. Over ensuing meetings, the brutish Amin engages the writer in a one-sided confessional, divulging the chaos of love, loss and revenge spawned in the slipstream of his brother’s death.
Consistent with his debut novel, Only Sound Remains (2), Asgari is intentional with constructing a world of binaries to explain the Iranian condition. East vs West, Regime vs Revolution, Old vs New, or rather, Old vs Ancient. Readers enter Desolation through two doors. The introduction quotes both the Quran, ‘And reckon not those who are killed in Allah’s way as dead: nay; they are alive (and) are provided sustenance from their Lord,’ as well Bhagavad Gita (as famously referenced by Robert Oppenheimer), ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of the worlds.’ Superficially, these conflicting quotes purport to mimic the most classic binary of Good vs Evil. Yet the particularity of referencing martyrdom and nuclear weaponry is an almost comical nod to the specific modern politics of Iran, where religion and violence do not contest, but collide. Interpreting Desolation demands understanding this doublespeak. In this book, as in the lives of Iranians, opposites are not so simple.
Since the Revolution of 1979, those both within the country and in diaspora have largely divided into two camps that favour directly contrasting ideologies. Those in favour of the theocratic regime see its opponents as vessels of Western imperialism, while these opponents see regime supporters as extremists betraying the Iranian people. In Desolation, this spectrum is primarily represented by Amin’s brothers: ‘Hamid… an almost atheist (or as Vahid called him, the West-Maniac)’ and ‘Vahid, the devout Muslim (or as Hamid dubbed him, the Sheik)’ (p11). The brothers stand in as one-dimensional narrative cushions to freely absorb all stereotypes. Hamid has the ‘logical brain’ (p14) – trained in mathematics, dispassionately objective, appreciative of Western intellectualism and classical music. Meanwhile, Vahid is a man of purely theistic reasoning, moving from prayer to emotional outbursts at Hamid’s provocations. The traits portrayed by the two characters are depthless – almost satirically so. Hamid’s intellectual superiority fails him in his morality, for example, telling Amin, ‘[when] someone can benefit from it, then it’s only logical to lie’ (p17). Meanwhile, Vahid struggles to be cognisant of his own behavioural irony, yelling at Hamid, ‘screw you!’, as he leaves for the mosque (p16). The brothers exist exactly and only in response to each other; an inverse relationship reflecting the hollowness of political polarisation. With no shared traits but an equal outwards repulsion, Hamid’s insistence to be X forces Vahid to be Y, and vice versa. Neither is able to possess true self-determination, both instead suffering a loss of their own dimensionality. Establishing the division between the brothers early on positions these characters as both political and poetic signposts; stagnant constants between which nuance can be located.
It is fitting then that the principal challenger of Iranian binaries in Desolation is its female characters. Commendably, a recognisable objective of Asgari’s work is to communicate the inherently patriarchal nature of the Islamic Regime. In Only Sound Remains, Asgari executed this through a paternal character’s unrequited love for Forough Farrokhzad – the feminist Iranian poet who often wrote on sex and sensuality – leading to her death. In Desolation, a Farrokhzad-esque character returns in the form of Amin’s neighbour, Parvaneh.
Parvaneh is the young daughter of a family who move from Tehran to Amin’s hometown of Mashhad to gain safety from the war. Upon meeting, Amin immediately perceives Parvaneh as ‘different’ on a superficial spectrum of Westernisation. She is unlike the girls he knows who ‘didn’t wear any make-up and neither tweezed their facial hair nor plucked their eyebrows’ (p13). After sharing a secret phone call, the two begin meeting at Parvaneh’s house alone, enacting classics Western “dates”. They watch Western movies, listen to Western music, kiss, and steal alcohol to drink from her parents’ stash. It is through Amin’s lens that Parvaneh’s house is constructed as an Eden, with Parvaneh playing the role of Eve. She is sinful and sensual; as sickly sweet as the ‘sugar cube from the sugar bowl’ he toys with when discussing her with Hamid (p17).
While Amin portrays Parvaneh to the reader as his temptress, his internal monologue betrays any semblance of his own pureness. His desires for her stem from a craving for possession and power. He lusts for her even as he critiques her, ‘He was aroused. Not because of the make-up, which he could tell was done poorly, but because she had done all that for him’ (p35). As their relationship develops, his surface level understanding of her as “a girl who plucks her eyebrows” does not. Rather, his growing sexual fantasies override his perception of her humanity. This dynamic is at its most critical when Parvaneh reveals that she, like Farrokhzad, is a writer, and Amin asks her to read him a story even though ‘he wasn’t really interested’ (p40): ‘She stood there for a moment as though she wasn’t sure why she had the notebook in her hand, vulnerable and fragile,’ Amin thinks, ‘like a young girl who was about to get undressed in front of someone for the first time in her life’ (p41).
Importantly, Parvaneh’s story cleverly serves as a metaphor for the Islamic Regime. In her auto-fictive piece about a girl named Shadi – meaning joy – she writes: ‘On the school bus, Shadi is thinking about how she would love to wear a yellow scarf the same colour as the butter in her sandwich when two fire engines overtake the bus; their sirens, loud, almost angry, pierce her ears. Is there any resemblance between that fierce noise penetrating one’s ears and losing one’s virginity? She wonders’ (p43). Moving from the contrasting elements of a school bus to sex via ‘loud, almost angry sirens’ is a purposeful clash of binaries by Asgari. A child’s daydreams are aggressively interrupted, her innocence invaded. Simultaneously, the reality of her “innocence” is also challenged, as readers must consider the double meaning of ‘scarf’. Does Shadi dream of a knitted item to be worn in the cold? Or is it more likely that she instead refers to the headscarf required to be worn of school-attending girls in Iran? Readers being forced to contend with this story within a story (within a story) is a further manifestation of the complexity of Iranian subjugation. The question of “freedom” as false joys. The past, and perhaps even the future, as simply more colourful fictive versions of existing oppression. Consistent with the rest of their interactions, the story is something about Parvaneh that Amin is unable to comprehend: ‘‘I think it’s very good,’ he lied. He had found it slow and boring’ (p45).
Asgari further likens Amin’s apathetic sexual gaze to the Regime’s gendered violence through the introduction of another female character, Marziyeh. Like Parvaneh, Amin first perceives Marziyeh on a superficial spectrum of Westernisation, as a woman in a ‘black Arab chador’ (p77). Again, like Parvaneh, this perception does not develop but grows increasingly sexualised: ‘Amin didn’t want to be around Marziyeh either. Was it because she was still young and beautiful, with her coffee-coloured skin and black eyes? Because wrapped from head to toe in that black cloth and silence, he found her irresistible?’ (p83). Even as Amin concludes he ‘could never love a woman like her, conservative and ordinary’ he still ‘desire[s] her… staring at her body under that long black chador… on her knees, her upper body straight, rubbing the cleaning liquid off the glass door’ (p87). Like Hamid and Vahid, Marziyeh and Parvaneh are Iranians existing in opposition. Yet while the male characters do so through their own self-representation, the female characters are assigned their positions purely by Amin’s perception. Ultimately and most pertinently: neither women are safe from his dehumanisation, as no women are safe under the Regime’s patriarchal rule.
While Desolation is successful in collapsing binaries amongst Iranians, it conversely bolsters problematic distinctions between the Middle East and the West. Asgari has argued: ‘what fiction can achieve that historical texts cannot, is illustrate the interior life of people. And I think by doing that novels can get closer to certain social and psychological truths that a history book cannot lay claim to… [we] should include as many perspectives as possible in order to get closer to the “truth” (3). This expansive pursuit of truth through the personal is a valid feat. Afterall, as the saying goes, the personal is political. Asgari enacts this by sidelining the actual downing of IR655 to instead explore its ricochet effects through Amin. Yet by placing inadequate weight on the event itself, what Asgari identifies as ‘his grief… his not-so-elegant understanding of fate, and faith, and free will’ (4) struggle to locate plausible grounding. Instead, the “true” Iranian experience collapses inwards. Amin descends into sexual depravity, cruelty and religious devotion. When the book climaxes with Amin almost joining Al Qaeda, Iranians return to violent geopolitics as our immoveable base. Most dangerously, the conversation on terror in the Middle East is reduced to being understood as a response that is not only equal to trauma, but also intrinsically cultural.
At the time of writing this review, the U.S and Israel have launched operations against the Islamic Regime. Ayatollah Khameini and many of his leadership team have been declared dead. Iranians, and many others, have continued the outwards drift to ideological opposites. Perhaps the most prevailing lesson Desolation can provide through its mediations on “truth” is the starkest one: that the greatest threat remains the loss of our humanity. To be made as Amin becomes and remains even at the novel’s conclusion, unable to be decisive of his own actions, enacting a cruelty that knows neither reason nor end. In the West’s eastward gaze, these Iranian stories are just things that happen In That Part of The World. Rumi wrote long ago: ‘the Friend comes into my body looking for the centre, unable to find it, draws a blade, strikes anywhere’ (5). Yes, these are things that happen in that part of the world. What Desolation warns us against is making these traumas our centre and mistaking these narratives for our only “truth”.
NOTES
- Ghasemi, J (2004) Iran Chamber Society: History of Iran – Shooting Down Iran Air Flight 655.
- Asgari, H (2023) Only Sound Remains. Puncher & Wattmann.
- Asgari, H (2026) Matilda Bookshop: Hossein Asgari Q&A.
- ibid. Rumi, J and Barks, C (1996) The Essential Rumi. Harper.
ROUMINA PARSA is an Iranian Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.