My sisters remember other times that I’ve completely forgotten. The adult Kimiâ we meet is a mash-up of all the previous ones - tender child, angry teenager, troubled adult, sister, daughter, lover, friend. It’s visceral, cinematic, and suspenseful.īut it’s also funny and charming, insightful and inspiring. Kimiâ is an astute tour guide, and her recollections will transport you to the Iran of her childhood: shopping in a French supermarket, vacations at Second Uncle’s house, a coffee table laden with homemade cardamom-seed cookies and orange blossom-water crepes, soldiers storming her front door. Her narration loops and swirls - following ‘the natural fits and starts’ of recollection - as she slowly advances and retreats on the catalyst for everything that came after. If your education is a bit thin on the history of Iran, fear not author Négar Djavadi deftly weaves the details into the narrative with invisible threads.Įarly on, Kimiâ references something she calls The EVENT.

The personal, decisive moments of the Sadr family’s story play out against the Iranian Revolution of 1979. And there are grandmothers, uncles, sisters, cousins, and neighborhood friends, all essential to the tale and to Kimiâ learning to understand herself. We meet her parents Darius and Sara, a pair whose love was rivaled only by devotion to revolution. There’s the great-grandfather who collected 52 wives at his estate in Mazandaran, a province in the north of Iran with green hills and cooling mist. Her family is almost the stuff of folklore. She bides her time by telling us her family’s life story and slowly revealing what brought her to this chair in this room. When we meet Kimiâ, she’s alone in the waiting room of a Paris clinic. She’s an exile from Iran, the daughter of a dissident journalist, and the granddaughter of a woman born into a 19th-century harem. Our heroine Kimiâ Sadr is a storyteller - sardonic and breathtakingly vulnerable, a modern Scheherazade with a predilection for punk rock.

Disoriental negar djavadi