To attempt to describe the course of events laid out in this story would be pointless. A delusional narrator driven beyond despair is hardly reliable. In the West, the owl is commonly associated with wisdom, but in Iran and India the bird is considered a bad omen and, as the translator notes, Hedayat was likely aware of both of these contexts-the pen case painter seems to be uncertain if he hopes to understand or exorcise the demons he carries, the macabre dreams and visions that haunt him, and the crime he may, or may not have committed. The novella is presented as a confession, the narrator feverishly scrawls out his account, addressing it to an imagined confessor, a shadow on the wall of his room that resembles an owl.
It does not matter how much of the author’s own psychology is embedded here (he will commit suicide in 1951 in Paris at age 48), the real power of this work lies in its ability to create a tortured, internal irreality that spins on its own frenzied axis to reach a bizarre climax that, in the end, leaves more questions than answers. It can, and has been analyzed, symbolism examined, but that seems less interesting to me having finished the book. The influence of writers like Jung, Rilke, Poe and most notably, Kafka is strong, but this absurdist tale seems to be driven by its own cluster of existential horrors. On the first page, Hedayat famously wrote: “The printing and sale in Iran is forbidden.” Although the setting of the story the Iranian city of Rey, and, briefly, in India has a classical atmosphere, there is a strong, idiosyncratic modernist feel. And then, as you start to unwind the experience, it takes on an eerie, impressive, surreal quality-no less dark-but unlikely to easily slip from the imagination once wedged there.Ī classic of twentieth century Iranian literature, The Blind Owl was composed during the latter years of the oppressive reign of Reza Shah and first published in 1936 in Bombay where the author, writer and intellectual Sadegh Hedayat was studying. After finishing the last page it sits heavy in the gut. Consumed with death, decay, sexual obsession and frustration. A hallucinogenic, opium-soaked account of a lonely pen case illustrator’s decent into madness, it is disorienting. The Blind Owl is a not an easy book to read.
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