Khanoom/Veil

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Darya
by Darya
18-Dec-2007
 

I finally got to read both the book "khanoom" by Masoud Behnoud and also went and saw "Veil", the play by Shahin Sayadi so I decided to share my take on both of them. As an Iranian who has lived in west for a while I found the book quite valuable in articulating the Iranian characters and teaching history as they experienced it and I can not wait to read other books by the author. I should first confess that longtime ago when another book by Mr. Behnoud, "The Last Queen" had come out I had eagerly rushed out to the book store and purchased it only to be disappointed after about 50 pages, finding the way the characters are portrayed is not to my taste. My opinion was and is that it is okay to play with real historical characters to make a story but it seemed to me that author was abusing his power to demonize some of the characters out of the historical context. So given that history, when I received this book khanoom as A gift few years ago I was less than willing to give it a chance and it sat on my book shelf for few years until couple of weeks ago that I decided to go and watch the play so I decided to give the book a chance too. This time I was completely taken by surprise and fell in love with the way Behnoud teaches about the social affairs of the Qajar royal family. I was less impressed by foreign characters and their relations to Iranian characters which were simplistic and a typical picture of what optimistic Iranians think of western culture I always find this the root of many misunderstandings between these different culture. The character of the catholic priest who is so respectful of another interpretation of religion is one example of that or the way a gay character is painted as one of the evil characters of the book is another one.
Regarding the play, although Sayadi had gone to far on westernizing the Iranian female characters views, I found his interpretation of the story very modern, western characters more believable and the story compatible with the western values. I also liked how he ended the story, I think it would have been much better if Mr. Behnoud had also ended the story gracefully where Sayadi ended it since quite frankly the last part of the book not only does not fit well with the rest but also does not have much of a story value either, it only reminded me of people like Rudy Giuliani who try to insert a "911" in any sentence regardless of the context.

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