Behrooz Ghamari

"Rather than a memoir, I think of Remembering Akbar as an autobiographical novel, very similar in terms of genre to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. The main narrator of the story, Akbar, takes the reader through different moments of imprisonment and introduces different characters with intimate details. Although the circumstances are all real in the story, some times the characters are based on composite real people. Writing in the form of a novel also gave me the ability to move with more ease between different planes of reality and imagination. By moving freely between what is real and what is imagined, I thought I could get closer to the experiences of prisoners who do actually live in that kind of space.".
"I also consider Remembering Akbar to be a book of history from below."
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/26451/new-texts-out-now_behrooz-ghamari-rem...

I was quite apprehensive about reading this book for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I know so little about Iran that I thought the book would be way over my head and secondly I have no head for stories of torture or cruelty. As it turned out, I could not wait for each opportunity to snatch a few more pages of reading, clutching my kindle wherever I went just on the offchance. When I was unable to read, my mind was chewing over all the questions the book raised for me.… (mere)