The House of the Mosque

A good piece of literature is not an abstract of the daily news. You already have newspapers. What a good writer could do is to build up a narrative, more or less connected to the immediate ground and environment, but reavealing what is humanly common. Kader Abdolah (the pen name of Hossein Sadjadi Ghaemmaghani Farahani). It is a society in change of the Iran in the 20th century, seen from a well defined location - the house of the mosque - with roles played by family members of an extended family. People are changing following the pressure of times, are taking sides, are killed or dye. If you are weak you are a flexible subject of history, if not, you could remain yourself and look wisely around you, not without disappointment and sadness. Is this book a window to another culture, not easy to grasp? Almost all the cultures, whatever open links they have - as a language worldwide spoken, or cultural marks present in the public space - have always an identity of their own you cannot understand otherwise than by getting deep into the cultural codes more or less shared. What you have to assume from the very beginning is that these other worlds are made by very real human beings, but living in various cultural and political environment. The ways in which they react at the pressures of the environment could be different. What we ofently see is the final result of these interactions. Literature, as arts in general, could make these translations smoothly.