My Part of Her

January 20, 2020
Djavahery’s mesmerizing English-language debut illustrates how betrayal can have far-reaching ramifications. Unfolding as the confessions of an unnamed narrator to a former prison cellmate, the events related take place during the idyllic summers of the narrator’s mid-1970s youth in Iran, ending with a coda set decades later. The narrator explains how, at 13, he parlayed his relationship with his beautiful 16-year-old cousin, Niloufar, into a role as her representative, meting out information about her in exchange for money and whiskey and, more importantly, for status within his circle of friends. He explains the heady, irresistible sense of empowerment and his eventual act of treachery, the stunning consequences of which are not revealed until the book’s conclusion. Against the backdrop of the final years of the Shah’s reign, Djavahery captures the innocence and hope embodied by young people on the verge of adulthood, the allure of the underground for burgeoning minds, and the rending apart of friends and family during the Islamic revolution in 1979. Driven by the narrator’s regretful voice, Djavahery’s excellent, gripping tale depicts misplaced, youthful ambition and the conflicts of changing social norms.

Starred review from December 1, 2019
Searing novel, by Iranian exile Djavahery, of love and betrayal in a time of revolution. "If we were to have a reunion one day, it would have to take place in a cemetery." In his English-language debut, screenwriter/novelist Djavahery writes pensively of an unnamed young man, just 13 when we meet him, who is hopelessly smitten by his 16-year-old cousin, Niloufar, whose name means "water lily" in Farsi. She is beautiful, with long, black, curly hair and large eyes, and she swims like a dolphin in the cool waters of the Caspian Sea, carefree thanks to prosperous parents who are also members of the Communist Party: "Wealth, power, an elegant mother who looked like a Hollywood starlet...so different from the archetype of our mothers." Like a figure out of Homer, Nilou also happens to have numerous suitors, two in the lead, one as beautiful as she, the other a klutz with the demeanor of a "beaten dog" whom our narrator lures into a compromising situation that will forever shame him. Not even the arrival of another cousin, half Iranian and half German, who sports "the tiniest bikini on the south coast of the Caspian" can dim the ardor of the local boys for Nilou. Come the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini a few years later, and all those golden youth face doom. Called into service in the war that soon erupts with Iraq, some are squandered in suicide attacks while Nilou disappears, joining a leftist revolutionary group in Kurdistan, or so the narrator believes. A comrade eventually betrays her, as will her cousin, who, having also joined a Communist cell, decides that he cannot face the torture that is visited on him when he's captured. At times reminiscent of Giorgio Bassani's Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Djavahery's novel is an aching evocation of a paradise lost, one that is impossible to regain, even in our narrator's searching dreams. Vivid, shattering, and utterly memorable.

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January 1, 2020
He feels with agony the distance of the three years between them. At 13, he is still practically a child, while wealthy 16-year-old Nilou, his distant cousin, is practically a woman. But in their summers during the 1970s at a resort town on the Caspian Sea, he becomes powerful as the boy who can help Nilou's suitors gain access to her. One, an athletic volleyball player who drives a motorcycle, is seen as the top contender for her love. But the other, a strong young man who suffers from a stammer but nonetheless sings beautifully, loves her hopelessly and steadily. The unnamed cousin who narrates this story years later signals his imminent betrayal of one of the suitors, an act that will come back to both him and Nilou after the upheaval of the Iranian Revolution. This English-language debut of exiled Iranian novelist Djavahery captures the headiness of youth, with all its promise and peril, and displays how seemingly small actions can become pivotal moments when the world is turned on its head.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)