Book Review, The Good Daughter
It’s good.
Okay what else can I say? I have never written any book reviews in my life, before this one. O’ yeah, I also hardly ever read any books either. I can’t tolerate them, going through page after page of blah blah blah. I have a ton of half-read books in my apartment; Rosemary’s Baby, Letters to My Torturer, World Almanac, just to name three, but also Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, and The Museum of Innocence. I mean, give me a break! Orhan was supposed to be so good that once one started reading one of his books one could not put it down until the end of it. But I did, one-third through Istanbul I put it down, and I haven’t picked it up yet. The toilet paper page marker is still between pages 118 and 119. And, don’t let me forget about Shakespeare’s Sonnets. What a nutcase of a man! Here is one of his poems:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Well! Actually, by coincident this poem ain’t that bad. I think the last line is supposed to mean, with successive efforts they all, the pebbles, strive to move forward; and that’s what we have here with Jasmin Darznik’s new book, The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. It is the story of three generations of women in the life of the author, “each changing place with that which goes before.” Each woman is trapped in their own place and time, struggling to move forward.
Jasmin Darznik’s well researched book, which I read in two days, chronicles the story of her mother’s hidden past, through the abuses in her life, and lives before her; their struggles with poverty, unjust marital life, and ills of the society, in a place and time that no longer seem to exist till a photograph is accidentally found half way around the world; a picture of Jasmin’s mother in a wedding veil, standing next to a man whom Jasmin has never known before.
But through this tale we learn how the life of a woman with a broken nose in Avenue Monirieh is connected to the life of a grand-daughter in the USA, who eventually graduated with a Doctorate Degree in English literature from Princeton University. The story that is told by Jasmin’s mother takes us to a place and time where women in dusty streets of Tehran were virtually without any rights. Once the photograph is discovered, Jasmin’s mother, Lili, refuses to talk about it, but eventually she begins to share her story with Jasmin, through cassette tapes sent to her by mail, revealing a history of abuse and neglect. It’s through these tapes that it’s revealed that Lili was forced to abandon a daughter by her first marriage, a price she had to pay to escape that wretched life.
The book is a treasure to read. For those who still remember the old days of living in Iran, it will touch you in ways that might have been hidden deep inside, and for those non-Iranians who don’t know, it’s filled with a wealth of information about a way of life in an exotic land.
There is no shame in moving forward, “as the waves make towards the pebbled shore.”
