Song of a Captive Bird

November 27, 2017
In this sumptuous debut novel, Darznik (The Good Daughter, a memoir) retells the fleeting life of a real-life Iranian feminist, poet, and director. In this imagining—told with the vulnerability and confidence of a memoir—Forugh Farrokhzad grows up in a Tehran where women and girls see little of the world beyond their own garden walls, but the glimpses are formative. Poetry is the thread that weaves through Forugh’s journey: the familial and romantic relationships that uplift and crush her; the darkest hours of isolation where she is made to forget her own work; the possibilities and promise, always just out of her reach. Excerpts of her verses, translated by Darznik, light the path from Forugh’s tragic first love to the birth of her son, a passionate affair, her first publication, and her determination to remain independent in a world so focused on control. Forugh’s crucibles are not so dissimilar from those of her country, balancing a rich history and faith with a desire to secure a place in modern spheres of influence. As Forugh finds her stride, so does Darznik’s telling; the direct but descriptive voice soars as its subject makes a life for herself. Darznik’s marvelous homage to Forugh captures the frustration and determination she must have felt to overcome the strictures of her environment, beautifully recreating her difficult path to fame.

December 15, 2017
Unclean, unholy, immodest, disruptive--Forugh Farrokhzad endures the scorn of her family and society to become one of Iran's most prominent poets and a film director in this debut novel based on her real life.From the rise of the repressive Pahlavi dynasty to the 1953 coup bringing Mosaddegh to power, martial law in 1979, and the beginnings of revolution, Darznik (The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, 2011) weaves remnants of Forugh's real poetry through this bewitching tale of a woman transcending the strictures of a patriarchal society. There is no shortage of villains, including her domineering and abusive father, who insisted that even his children call him The Colonel. The novel opens with a troubling scene, as Forugh's mother ushers her to the shabby outskirts of Tehran to determine whether she is still a virgin. The virginity test comes like a rape to Forugh, leaving her shaken and setting the stage for disaster. Constantly seeking a way to play on the same field as men, Forugh discovers poetry, and her first poem commands even The Colonel's attention. Once her passion begins to show, however, his support abruptly ends, and her parents arrange a marriage to Parviz, who turns cold on their wedding night, rejecting her after seeing no blood on their sheets. A year later, stifled by her mother-in-law and disappointed in her husband, Forugh sneaks off to Tehran to find a publisher for her poetry, Nasser Khodayar, who becomes her lover as well. Recklessly publishing her first poem, "Sin," under her own name, Forugh sets in motion a cascade of events that will lead her to become an independent artist. But the path is long and twists through a mental asylum and divorce as well as the highs of love and showing her first documentary and the lows of social humiliations and prison.A thrilling and provocative portrait of a powerful woman set against a sweeping panorama of Iranian history.

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Starred review from November 1, 2017
In her memoir, The Good Daughter (2011), Darznik reveals her mother's long-hidden life in Iran, where she was married at 13, then forced to give up her firstborn to escape her brutally abusive husband. In Darznik's biographical first novel, her protagonist, based on the feminist Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-67), also loses her child in a battle for freedom. Young Forugh is a mischievous booklover and a budding poet often in trouble with her strict, unhappy mother and menacing father, a prominent colonel. Taken out of school after ninth grade and longing for a literary life, she becomes infatuated with an older cousin, a published writer. Scandal is narrowly averted by a hasty departure from Tehran and a quickly executed wedding. But Forugh will not be silenced by her smothering marriage; isolation in a dusty, gossipy town; or even love for her son. In dangerously candid poems, she asserts that a woman is a human being . . . that we, too, have a right to breathe, to cry out, and to sing. Eventually she slips back to Tehran, enters into a risky affair with an editor, and attains notoriety that costs her her son and, for a time, her sanity and independence. Darznik's knowledgeably invented characters and compellingly imagined scenarios, both of which are sensuous and harrowing, are deftly set within Iran's violent, oil-fueled, mid-twentieth-century political and social upheavals, and stay true to the essence of Farrokhzad's audacious, dramatic, and creative life and courageous commitment to writing revolutionary poems about being female in a tyrannically sexist society. Darznik even includes her own stunning translations of Farrokhzad's incandescent poetry. Farrokzhad is known as the Sylvia Plath of Iran, and the two poets were contemporaries, living lives at once starkly different and remarkably attuned, then dying young and tragically. Plath's renown is universal; Darznik's enthralling and illuminating novel will introduce Farrokhzad to a whole new world of readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from

As a child growing up in 1940s Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is repeatedly told that she is expected to become a submissive wife who stays out of the public eye. As an adult, however, Forugh's passion for poetry calls her to a very different life. (LJ 12/17)

In 1950s Iran, poet Forugh Farrokhzad poured her deeply intimate musings onto the page, precipitating a short, tumultuous life of censure and loss. Memoirist Darznik (The Good Daughter) skillfully employs Farrokhzad's own eloquent verse to re-create in fiction the life of this 16-year-old wife and mother who became the voice and face of Iran's early feminist movement under the Shah. Rebellious and questing by nature, Forugh envied her brothers' freedom, chafing under an authoritarian father and later a careless husband whose mother was the decision maker in the their home. Not even her adored son, Kami, could quell her yearning for full personhood; literature and creative writing were her only solace. Darznik captures Forugh's remarkable bravery and tenacity as she pursues her dream of becoming a published author and documentary filmmaker. In straightforward prose style, she illuminates the contrast between Tehran's sublime beauty and the hardships faced by those people, especially women, whose voices were silenced under the Shah and throughout the revolution. VERDICT Readers can't seem to get enough of fictional biography, and this first novel from Iranian American memoirist, professor, and essayist Darznik is a poignant, mesmerizing addition to the genre. [See Prepub Alert, 8/28/17.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

As a child growing up in 1940s Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is repeatedly told that she is expected to become a submissive wife who stays out of the public eye. As an adult, however, Forugh's passion for poetry calls her to a very different life. (LJ 12/17)