4.28/5

This book should be read alongside Blindness and Hunger, for the symbology and allegorical telling of the novel is not merely literal and physical, but existential and intellectual. The senses pine for more. The mind's expanse is infinite. What are young people who are thirsty for meaning and purpose in a leaden and desolate earth meant to do to find that purpose? Volunteer for the army? Follow excruciatingly simple orders like "defend this water tank"? Die for their country? Now meaning is fulfilled because their family members are told they died holding the objective.

Now a turn. When truth is commodified and used as a psychological tool, the writer becomes the sword rather than the pen. What now, is the writer meant to do in that same world with those same values and goals?

"Since time immemorial, we poets have assuaged and mollified the drunkenness of caliphs with our grandiloquent oratory and the tenderness of our temperament, to the accompaniment of the lute; and now we are expected to use our words to applaud and encourage the insane intoxication of our leaders, leaden words that have to march at the speed of a printing press, draped in military clothes and paraded in front of eyes that cannot stand seeing any bad news in print."

These are the questions before us against the backdrop and realities of the Iran-Iraq war, a war where every Western nation supported the war criminal Saddam Hussein, who would later become their very enemy not because of the genocides he committed (one of them in '86 during the war backed by the Americans), but because his nation had oil. The novel does not touch upon this — it was written before the illegal invasion of Iraq in '03, but it is there, ever present, like a cloud on a sunny day, like a drizzle on a dewy morning.

"A hill and a group of soldiers whose task is to defend it, a healthy, young prisoner whose life was extinguished in the instant it took to fire a bullet, and his well-built body shoved into a pit at the bottom of the hill."

Young people died, many on the Persian side for Iran did not have the backing of nearly every world leader unlike Saddam; however, young Iraqis died just the same, because those same leading nations needed to sell weapons.

What are we all doing, if not dying of thirst while being forced to defend a water tank just because we are told that is the way forward, whilst staring at the gaping maw of corporate surveillance and politicians in acting in the interests of their corporate backers?

"Skimming words, passing over words has become a habit for humans. Maybe if pen and paper hadn’t been invented, humans would have developed a sharper capacity for memorizing words. For example, this title of the “noblest in creation” might have left a trace on the memory of mankind that was not superficial and shallow; that would not have been forgotten, and if uttered it would not be out of habit, and so this most important judgement on mankind would not be destroyed by mankind, and this accursed brain would not have dragged me to the edge of insanity, to a point where I have arrived at the horrendous conclusion that there is nothing in this world more vile, base, destructive and hypocritical than the clay of Adam … and my captive in the trench is thirsty, Major. Even monkeys don’t take their own kind as captives …’"