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. ( )

Balali createsa comparison between the Tehran of his youth and the city after the fundamentalist revolution. While it is fiction, it is semi-autobiographical in that he himself grew up in Tehran and moved to the U.S. The main character, Shehad, is the son of a poor, but charismatic gadfly who frequently spends all of his money on partying and women while his wife and two sons are poorly housed and hungry. Shehad's world is the seedier part of the city peopled with various kinds of derelicts and unusual characters. Shehad becomes infatuated as a 12-yr-old with his mother's "friend" Houri - a sexy, western behaving woman who eventually betrays both Shehad and his mother by having an affair with Shehad's father.
The book also describes the Tehran that Shehan discovers when he returns after six years in the U.S. Things are very different and he can't even be sure that much of what he remembered was even true.
Interesting book, but plot is hard to follow due to the constant shifting between memories and recent and past. ( )

Mehrdad Balali’s Houri opens up the world of pre-revolutionary Iran’s poor, but unfortunately it’s wrapped up in narrative so depressing and distasteful that I longed to be through with the book.

Based on Balali’s own experiences, Houri tells the story of Shahed, the oldest son of a worthless scoundrel. Shahed’s father Baba doesn’t work. Instead he supports his family by selling off his inheritance for pennies on the dollar, borrowing money from loan sharks that he never intends to pay back, and sometimes outright theft. Supposedly a charming man, he barely provides anything for the family and instead spends most of his days driving around a spiffy car and attempting to pick up women.

It’s a depressing book. Every single character comes off as someone I’d hate. The father doesn’t appear to be very charming to me. Shahed is defined almost completely by how badly his father treats him, but also somewhat by how badly he treats his American girlfriend in later years. Shahed’s mother, while supposedly smart and pretty, also appears solely as an object for Baba to disdain. Cousins, uncles, grandparents, all are spendthrifts, tightwads, junkies, or religious nuts. Worse, none of the characters are interesting. Everything is a litany of boring thieving and chasing women interspersed with arguments over who is more put upon.

Presuming it’s an accurate portrayal, the bits and pieces of life in Iran are the one redeeming quality. Things like religious feasts, weddings, and circumcision rites in other cultures are interesting to learn about. But I can’t help but think I’d be better off reading them in non-fiction or a better story.

Balali inserts commentary about Iran’s culture of grief in a few places. If highlighting Iranian’s dourness was his goal, he’s certainly succeeded.

Reading this over, it feels like I am not explaining myself very well. However, writing more would end up making this even more negative. I am just not in the mood. I want to think about enjoyable things at the moment, so this will have to do.

Review also at my blog: http://reading.kingrat.biz/reviews/ho... ( )

"Houri" is the story of Shahed, a young man who is returning to Iran shortly after his father's death and the revolution that changed the country forever. Shahed left Iran for America years before, when Iran was a place where women could walk the streets unveiled and Iranians hungered for American fast food and music. He returns to an Iran whose leadership sees America as "The Great Satan."

Shahed must grapple with ambivalent feelings about his country, as well as his philandering father. The novel moves back in forth in time between Shahed's childhood in Iran, his years in America, and his return to post-revolutionary Iran. At first, the back and forth is a bit confusing, but the novel becomes more cohesive as it progresses. It's a fascinating look at the impact of repression on a once-democratic country, and on the impact of a dysfunctional home life on Shahed's adult relationships. A worthwhile read. ( )

I tried very hard to enjoy this book. I read patiently, waiting for some joy - waiting for some epiphany that would be life affirming. In the end, I did not particularly like or care for any character. It was a journey that took one to the depths and never returned. One depressing scene after another, one selfish and low character after another. It was so one dimensional in its view of Shahed's life that it became unbelievable. It disappointed greatly. I am trying to find a reason to recommend it, but cannot. ( )

While I was reading Houri, I enjoyed it. It was interesting, believable, and the story kept moving along. I was starting to wonder, about halfway through, whether I would learn to like the main character Shahed at all and eventually I did have some sympathy for him as a child. However, once I finished the novel, I found that I had major problems with the story itself: mainly, after the climactic event, the story just ends. Shahed stops remembering his childhood and goes back to America. There is no tidying up of loose ends, so the reader is left wondering what happened, not to the adult Shahed, (it is fine to leave the reader speculating about whether he is really changed by his trip home), but the child Shahed whose fate is certainly known by the adult version and could be summed up in a few sentences. ( )

At first, I hated this book and was dreading the slog through it. Of course, as a ER book, I wanted to give it a fair shake, especially because the publisher and LT went through the trouble of getting me a copy. Fortunately, it got better.

Initially, I felt the writing style was a little stiff and I also thought there were - and this is maybe a strange criticism - too many adjectives. Either Balali backed off them after a while, or I became accustomed to their excessiveness.

Anyway, on to the story - the tale is told in the present and through flashbacks to the narrator's childhood and relationship with a girl in America. Mostly, the past deals with his father and the way his father lives life at the detriment to his family.

The present deals with the narrator returning to Iran to see his mother after his father's funeral. He visits people from his past and tries to make sense of his father and the mystery of a large sum of money stolen from him as a child.

The recent past deals with his relationship with a girl in America and how his past helped to cloud his present/future.

So...even though the flashbacks make sense and are handled well, I couldn't rate this book to highly. Here's why: I don't believe there's one character that I liked. In fact, I feel I may actively have disliked all of them. But, Balali did give his characters some depth and a reader will receive plenty of reason to understand why they dislike the characters.

The dislike of the characters, at least for me, ultimately weighs down the book. There are some writers who create despicable or pathetic characters, but their writing is so incredible, that you'll happily give audience to their cast of misfits and rogues. Unfortunately, Balali isn't at that level of skill.

Still, it's not a horrible book and I'd lean towards recommending it to people who read books about dysfunctional families, foreign cultures or those trying to get their lives on track after having a rough go at childhood. ( )