The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran

#RivetingReviews: Mandy Wight reviews THE NIGHTS ARE QUIET IN TEHRAN by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin

by Mandy Wight, #RivetingReviews, European Literature Network

This is the story of a young Iranian couple, Behzad and Nahid, who flee Iran after the 1979 Revolution and settle and have a family in West Germany. Their story is told in four sections – each one narrated by a different member of the family – taking place at ten yearly intervals, often coinciding with significant events in Iran, and capturing both Iranian and German society at particular moments in time. Behzad is a revolutionary, and political developments in Iran are very much at the forefront of the narrative, yet these are interwoven with the characters’ personal lives, family relationships and the experience of exile and loss of culture. 

We first meet Behzad in 1979, when the Shah has been deposed, and progressive political activists are on the streets campaigning for a fairer society. Behzad and his comrades dream that portraits of the Shah in each schoolroom will be replaced by those of Che and Castro, of Mao and Lenin. For all the heady revolutionary fervour, the allusions to street fighting and blood, Behzad at twenty-seven still lives at home, enjoying observing the womenfolk prepare stuffed vine leaves, aware his mother watches him intently as he leaves to join the protests ‘as if she’s trying to memorise my face’. He’s also aware of a young woman amongst their group with serious, clever eyes – Nahid. As the revolution progresses it’s clear that religious elements are taking control, and within a short space of time, the revolutionaries have been outdone by Ayatollah Khomeini. The Revolutionary Guard starts carrying out the torture and executions of political opponents, and Behzad and his comrades start fearing for their lives.

Fast forward to 1989, and Bahzad and Nahid are now in Germany as political exiles. They’ve been invited to stay with their German friends, Walter and Ulla, and much as Nahid appreciates the friendship they’ve received, she can’t help noticing Ulla’s shabby house, wondering why she cuts her hair so short, or why on earth they’re all worried about the bad air their children are now breathing since Chernobyl – Iranian kids have got more than bad air to worry about. But the cultural differences go deeper than the domestic. Nahid was a student of Persian literature in Iran and misses the melody of her Persian language. When she’s given a book of German love poetry she’s familiar with, translated into Persian, the poems in German seem to her ‘dusty, just as I imagined love was here: hidden and dusty and cold’. 

The third section takes place in 1999 and has Laleh, daughter of Behzad and Nahid, now a teenager, visit Tehran one summer with her mother and younger sister, Tara. There are some wonderfully evocative, sensual descriptions here: Laleh’s feelings of being constantly crowded, physically overwhelmed, almost deafened by the many relatives and family friends who’ve come to see them, ‘their presence so loud, fabric-swathed bodies in a protected space, the clatter of crockery so loud as they cook, eat, drink tea, a constant silvery, dry clatter of one thing against another’. There’s the exhausting experience of walking in the streets of Tehran, the stifling heat, the dust and smell of hot asphalt and petrol in the air. 

Laleh struggles to relate to her girl cousins’ excitement about a visit to Sara Khanoom, the vigorous beautician who threads and plucks their eyebrows, a practice she’s never come across in Germany whereas here ‘the plucking torture … that’s all anyone talks about’. It’s when she meets Nima, the son of her parents’ friend Peyman, who was executed, that she learns about the student protests taking place in Tehran, the demonstrators brutally treated by government forces, beaten with TV cables, arrested and disappeared.

The fourth section is narrated by Mo, Laleh’s brother. He’s a student at a German university in 2009, allegedly studying geography but spending most of his time dossing about with his mate Tobi. He seems rather distant from his family at first glance, but starts listening to a serious news channel for updates on the nascent Green Movement, and finds himself wondering what his parents think about it all – though doubtless his Dad would give him advice, which he would see no need to follow. He goes along to some student protests about tuition fees – small fry perhaps, compared to what’s happening in Iran, but nevertheless signs of a developing political consciousness. 

I really enjoyed the combination here of deeply felt personal experiences – the growing fear of political persecution in Iran, the love of family, the alienation and cultural loss felt in Germany – with the portrayal of political events and changing social mores in both countries. And the polyphonic structure is just the right vehicle to convey the different experiences of men and women, as well as the different experiences of first- and second-generation refugees, their individual voices superbly rendered in Ruth Martin’s fine translation.

THE NIGHTS ARE QUIET IN TEHRAN, by Shida Bazyar; Translated by Ruth Martin; Published by Scribe (2025)

Mandy Wight has published several translations from German on the No-Mans-Land Website, including excerpts from novels by Ursula Krechel, Nina Jäckle, Ulrike Edschmid, Natascha Wodin and Monika Helfer. In 2018 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation for her translation of an extract from Juli Zeh’s novel Unterleuten. She writes on books in English and in translation at her blog Peakreads.

Via European Literature Network