The back cover says this novel is about "the repressions of the Shah [and:] the brutality of the Islamic fundamentalist government", but it's mostly about the narrator's tragic childhood with a thoughtless playboy wastrel of a father (possibly standing in metaphorically for the Shah?), with glimpses into his aimless life in America and his post-Revolution return. Women are all victims or temptresses; personal dysfunction seems to be more the order of the day than politics. Certainly there are elements that are worthwhile here, but I expected a more incisive critique.

Houri
by Mehrdad Balali
The Permanent Press
December 2009
303 pp.
ISBN-10: 1579621775
ISBN-13: 978-1579621773

When you begin to read Houri, you are descending into Iranian airspace through the voice of Shahed, a man returning to his homeland on the third anniversary of his fathers death. His name means “witness” and through his eyes, Mehrdad Balali allows you to see his country juxtaposed in a time warp of culture. Shahed left Iran as a youth, running away to America. His father died in 1979, but this pilgrimage takes him back to a Post-Revolutionary Iran, a new world for Shahed. He steps out of the plane into a strikingly different climate upon his return. There is evidence of subjugation and authoritarian rule everywhere. The obvious, bearded men and veiled women. The more subtle changes would only be noticed by a “witness” from the past, missing landmarks, renamed streets, businesses that have vanished.

As a child, Shahed hated his father and often prayed for him to die. His father led a sybaritic life, always seeking pleasure and excitement at times while his family suffered. He chased money and women that led to bitter memories for Shahed. He believes his father’s death was timely for him as the “fun and joy were being clubbed to death in Iran.”

Shahed is returning now to seek closure, perhaps find the answer to his questions and come to understand his father. Shahed experiences the tyranny and oppression under Khomeini and his reaction is surprising as he yearns for his father. “Suddenly, I began to miss him, the man I’d so intently avoided when he was alive. ......The past looked happy, alive and romantic, and the present had the sour taste of a hangover.”

Houri is absorbing and offers a panoramic vision of a country not always defined with such clarity and perspective. With a keen sense of his audience the author creates the character of Shahed as his voice. This allows for his ability to travel back in time and across continents adding his personal experiences to enhance and add valuable details.
A reflective, emotional and ironic story that shouldn’t be missed. ( )

In a novel based upon his own life, Mehrdad Balali writes of changes in Iran between the late 1960s and the early 1980s via the struggles of one family. The novel is told through the eyes of a 12-year-old Iranian boy and the boy, as a man, some 14 years later. I lived in Iran for a few years encompassing some of this time. I was there before the revolution, during it, and saw the aftermath. Mr. Balali is alone among Iranian-American writers I have read since then in capturing the essence of the country, its people and culture. However, his prose is journalistic in tone (as might be expected since he's a journalist) and I would have liked more showing and less telling of the characters feelings, thoughts and motivations. I didn't feel like I got to know the characters well enough. ( )

Despite naming the book after the narrator's teenage crush, Houri is less about sexual longing and more an account of a horrible childhood living with a narcissistic and abusive father. Houri (the crush) shares a name with the women who cater to martyrs in the afterlife, so perhaps the author was making a poetic comparison between the empty promises of a religious afterlife and the sort of paradise and reward that can be found here on Earth through love, acceptance, and forgiveness.

As other reviewers have said, the final revelation of the narrator, Shahed, seems sudden and lacking substance. After hundreds of pages chronicling the horrendous wrongs perpetrated by his irresponsible father on Shahed personally as well as the extended family and indeed the entire neighborhood, realizing the old man was just doing his best smacks not of the narrator coming to discover a great universal truth, but rather yet another instance of the son's Stockholm Syndrome. The resulting redemption of Shahed, while a satisfying conclusion to a depressing book, seems a non sequitur when hung off of this unwarranted change of heart.

Where the book excels is describing and comparing the culture of Iran before and after the 1979 revolution. When the cast of unsympathetic characters are taken as personifications of differing political views, Shahed's tragic personal life seems a microcosm of the clash of philosophies within the country. ( )

For the first few weeks I read this book, every time I went to pick it up I dreaded it. I just didn't want to face it. It wasn't that it was poorly written, it was just a really heavy book with some dark material. It was written "based largely on the personal experiences of an Iranian-American journalist, about life in Iran; from the repressions of the Shah to the brutality of the Islamic fundamentalist government." The main character of the book is Shahed. Much of the story takes place in Iran when Shahed is twelve years old and living under very poor circumstances because his father wastes the family money on other women and parties instead of caring for his family. Shahed is at that youthful age of hunger. He is hungry for food that is always lacking in the home. He is hungry for the shiny material goods he hears are abundant in the West. He is beginning to hunger for the beauty of women. And that is when the beautiful Houri enters their lives and Shahed turns to theft as he dreams of luring her away from her husband.

The tale continues several years later when an adult Shahed returns to Tehran from America to visit his mother after his father's death and sees what the Revolutions has done to his homeland.

While I started this read with much trepidation because of its dark theme and depressing characters, I finished the last 200 pages finding it difficult to put it down or stop thinking about the story.

I don't want to give any spoilers to anyone thinking of reading it, but I will say that I found the conclusion somewhat disappointing as there was a sudden revelation that occurred and then a sudden mood change and things wrapped up rather quickly. I didn't find it believable. But, as always, it wasn't my story, my revelation, my mood. I cannot say for certain it wasn't possible. I've read several reviews that have been written about this novel and I feel people have judged it too harshly because they didn't like any of the characters. I think that's an unfair assessment upon which to judge a story.

Would I recommend this book to others? It is an interesting read of family life within Iran during the time of the Shah and how things have changed for the people there since. ( )