Man of My Time

Starred review from February 10, 2020
This mesmerizing and unsettling novel by Whiting Award–winner Sofer (The September of Shiraz) diagrams the monstrous shaping of an Iranian interrogator by decades of cultural and political upheavals. While visiting New York on a diplomatic mission to the UN in the present day, Hamid Mozaffarian is tasked by his mother and brother with carrying the remains of his long-estranged father back to them in Iran—an undertaking that spurs him to take stock of how he became the man his family hardly knows. Mozaffarian reflects on how his youthful ambition during and following the 1979 revolution led to his transformation into a self-deluded bureaucrat who would condemn others as casually and arbitrarily as he would offer mercy. He also looks back on lost loves, and the discord between him and his wife, Noushin, who left him five years earlier (“You’re just a warden with a wedding ring,” she told him on the way out), and their daughter, whom he hasn’t seen for three years. The tension between the elegance of Sofer’s language and the nihilistic unraveling of her antihero emphasizes the irony of the title, which lays bare the conceit that a person’s actions might be excused by historical context. Readers will find Sofer’s meditation on power’s ability to corrupt as relevant and disturbing as the day’s headlines.