cover image Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning

Bahman Sholevar. Concourse Press, $21.25 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-911323-17-7

Poet ( Rooted in Volcanic Ashes ) and novelist ( The Night's Journey ) Sholevar uses a variety of narrative techniques and stylistic devices to present the personality of a ``permanent alien'' exiled from his nation and his culture. Torn between the courageous legacy of his dead relatives and the decadence of his living kin, Farhang Shadzad, an Iranian living in Iowa, spends an agonizing weekend debating whether to return to Iran for his mother's funeral. In a strange twist of fate, his mother, like his father 14 years earlier, has died on the birthday of their middle son, a leftist revolutionary who was tortured and executed by the Savak. Farhang has spent the intervening years trying to throw off this psychological burden. His millionaire Uncle J., a former cabinet minister in the Shah's government, and his thoroughly Americanized older brother Cyrus urge him not to return to his homeland. Yet he decides to risk the dangers there because the gesture will serve as ``the first authentic existential act of my life.'' Once back in Iran, Farhang discovers tyranny has simply exchanged Western clothing for fundamentalist garb, and that now, as in the old regime, money pushes buttons. With dramatic resonance, Sholevar turns this cynical discovery into a soul-saving epiphany for Farhang. (Oct.)