Review · Asymptote
A violin inside the upheaval
Noubel reads Poupeh Missaghi’s English translation through love, music, social power and the narrator’s foreknowledge.
- Credited to
- Filip Noubel
- Publication
- Asymptote
- Source date
- 15 July 2024
- Published language
- English
- This page
- English source guide
Works discussed
Original English editorial guide to the attributed English-language source. The critic’s interpretations remain theirs; the full source stays with its publisher.
The warning before the journey
Noubel begins with the narrator’s warning that this love story will also be a story of violence and death. He follows the way that foreknowledge colours the movement of Jamil and Naji through family, revolution, war and exile. Their private relationship opens onto a much wider social world. Source 1
The violin becomes an important presence in his reading. Lessons with Amrollah Khan provide artistic shelter for the lovers, while changes in the public world make that shelter precarious. Music brings another form of vulnerability into the same narrative as sexuality and social difference. Source 1
Unequal relationships
His review examines the distinction between the lovers’ relationship and sexual encounters shaped by wealth, coercion and power. He traces conflicting expectations of masculinity through the people they meet. These observations belong to Noubel’s reading of the novel and are not a general explanation of sexual identity. Source 1
Noubel also attends to the lovers’ contrasting temperaments, betrayals, reunions and hopes, and to the book’s conversation with Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. The column credits the English translation to Poupeh Missaghi. Its other novel is reviewed by Samantha Siefert, a separate contribution to the same publication. Source 1
Sources & credits
- Filip Noubel · Asymptote
Boys of Love section of the 15 July 2024 New in Translation column. Noubel writes this review; Samantha Siefert writes the separate review of Carlos Labbé in the same column.