He Tried to Change the System, Then Became It

Karolis Strautniekas. Courtesy New York Times.

by Rebecca Makkai, New York Times

MAN OF MY TIME
by Dalia Sofer

“We were a skipped generation, a hiccup in history,” says Hamid Mozaffarian, the narrator of Dalia Sofer’s novel “Man of My Time.” He is on the phone with his brother, who left Iran for New York with their parents during the 1979 revolution, while Hamid, a once idealistic revolutionary, stayed behind. Life has not turned out well for either brother, in a world that is, as another character puts it, “inclining towards darkness.”

Sofer, who was raised in an Iranian Jewish family that left for the United States when she was 11, explored the years shortly after the revolution in her first novel, “The Septembers of Shiraz” (2007). She takes a much longer view in her follow-up, a layered portrayal of a man who through several decades has carried with him the conflicting pieces — beauty and brutality, revolt and repression — of his country’s history.

Hamid accompanies his boss, a government minister, to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, hoping to retrieve from a warehouse in Queens a stolen 16th-century drawing of a pilgrim by the Iranian artist Reza Abbasi. We soon learn the irony of Hamid’s hopeless quest for a work of art whose theft is “a matter of national indignation”: Once an aspiring artist and cartoonist himself, he has spent much of his life as a state interrogator, a “humorless arbiter of fates” silencing Iranian artists.

[ Read an excerpt from “Man of My Time.” ]

Also in New York are the remains of Hamid’s father, a professor of art history and a former top official in the shah’s Ministry of Culture, who has just died, decades after Hamid last spoke to him. Hamid will leave without the Abbasi sketch but with a portion of his father’s ashes in a mint candy tin in his pocket: His final wish was to be buried in his homeland.

The novel is largely retrospective, and the drama of the present day, while pivotal, receives far less ink than the path that led Hamid “from baffled revolutionary to aging captive of a life gone wrong.” The aging Hamid attends, and ruins, his father’s memorial dinner in New York; meets (in too convenient a sequence) a man whose uncle’s execution he oversaw; attempts a reconciliation with his grown daughter; and struggles to find the right time and place to spread the ashes in a country where cremation is verboten.

We spend more time in Hamid’s childhood, his tumultuous adolescence, his angry young adulthood. The price we and the author pay, of course, for a story that looks back is that we know exactly where things are headed; our curiosity lies in how they get there. Fortunately, in this case, the trade pays off. With Sofer’s considerable talents, the betrayals (of both self and others) that leave Hamid a brittle shell of a man are fully worthy of our intense gaze.

Young Hamid lives bent on rebellion, and on calling out hypocrisy, yet his every revolt is ultimately an act of self-sabotage. When he first becomes invested in the revolution as a young man, he dismisses his girlfriend’s concerns about the overly religious order that is replacing the shah’s. “This is like worrying about the buttons on an overcoat before it has even been sewn,” he tells her. “Can we agree, for now, that it has been a long, cold winter, and we desperately need a new coat?”

This shortsightedness might seem like Hamid’s own tragic flaw were it not writ large elsewhere throughout history. Like so many well-intentioned idealists, whether in past regimes or present administrations, Hamid in his post-revolution role as interrogator is sure he can undermine the system from inside. Instead, as he trudges from shaky justifications to unspeakable treachery, he ends up lamenting that “slowly, slowly, I’ve become the system.”

Here, as throughout, Sofer’s characters deliver such preternaturally complete and impassioned speeches, ones so full of aphorisms, that it would be tempting to take a line from any one as a thesis for the book. “You — all of you who left and never returned — are frozen in time,” Hamid tells his brother. Or: “Some people create and others destroy,” says Akbari, a revolutionary thug who winds up as Hamid’s terrifying boss. “You and I are among the destroyers.” In the midst of the moral murk that constitutes our antihero’s soul, it’s helpful to have axiomatic arrows to follow. But Sofer is doing something more complex here than just handing us pithy answers. No one pronouncement sums up either Hamid or his situation; the sum of them, in all their disagreements, might get close.

Mindful of an audience not steeped in Persian history, Sofer goes out of her way to provide historical orientation — sometimes deftly, in old news clippings, and sometimes more heavily, in expository dialogue. “He got his start in the Constitutional Revolution in 1906,” Hamid’s father tells the narrator in a childhood scene, referring to the exiled prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. “As prime minister he introduced social security and land reforms, and his downfall, as everyone knows, was his nationalization of the oil industry, which until then had been controlled by the British.” While helpful for an uninformed reader, it’s perhaps a bit much for a chat with a child on the way home from the dentist.

Similarly, the Persian phrases, usually idiomatic ones, that pepper the dialogue are translated for the reader throughout the book — often, puzzlingly, by the person who just spoke them. Sofer manages this naturally at times (“You’re back to your khorous jangi ways. My son, the fighting cock”), and a bit more nonsensically at others (“Shab-bekheyr — have a good night”).

All of this raises the question not of whom the book is for but to whom it’s being narrated. To whom is Hamid Mozaffarian telling this story? To whom is he, in theory, explaining himself? The self-examination he puts himself through in New York and then back in Tehran would suggest that the voice is an inward one, directed at the self. Or perhaps the audience he holds in his head is his family, his deceased father, whose legacy Hamid, in his role as destroyer, both reveres and obliterates. Yet the book’s exposition is angled toward an outsider’s gaze — and there’s real discord between the narrative’s commitment to interiority and the sacrifices it makes in explaining itself. This is the perennial struggle faced by any writer whose imagined narrative audience and likely actual audience don’t fully align, but there are solutions more elegant than these.

The arc of Hamid’s life is finely wrought, a master class in the layering of time and contradiction that gives us a deeply imagined, and deeply human, soul — an enviable skill always, but essential for attaching us to a character who, despite his attempts at self-betterment, is essentially unforgivable. But “forgiveness isn’t the point,” says Hamid’s daughter, Golnaz, who is struggling to come to terms with him. “The best I can do is try to understand.”

I won’t be alone in finding the dichotomy personal. My own father, after Hungary’s failed 1956 student revolt, arrived in the United States as a refugee. In the same week that I read about Hamid’s journey home with his father’s ashes, I was coming to accept that, quarantined in Chicago amid a pandemic, I would not make it back this spring for the interment of my father’s ashes in Budapest, where he’d repatriated at the age of 80. Like so many children whose parents were formed by histories wildly different from our own — and like both Golnaz and Hamid — I’ve sometimes found both forgiveness and understanding elusive.

While Sofer is part of a notable generation of Iranian-American writers who write, in part, about divided families, divided worlds and divided selves, she is also, more broadly, part of an enduring American tradition: the writer who lives, creatively, both here and in the imaginative territory of another time and place, a point of familial or personal origin that looms large. The beating heart of American literature has always been the contributions of those looking both forward and back, both at America and at the world. Members not of skipped generations, necessarily, but of Janus-headed ones, writing toward something more difficult than forgiveness.

Courtesy New York Times.

Rebecca Makkai is the author, most recently, of the 2018 novel “The Great Believers,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

MAN OF MY TIME
By Dalia Sofer
372 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.


Via New York Times