Moon Brow

April 2, 2018
In this beautiful and ambitious novel, Mandanipour (Censoring an Iranian Love Story) tells the story of Amir Yamini, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War who lost his left arm and much of his memory in battle. By day, Amir is confined to his family’s mansion in Tehran, left to aimlessly wander the gardens under the eye of his father’s guards. But by night, Amir is visited in his dreams by a woman he knows as Moon Brow, his true love, whose identity he cannot recall. With the help of his skeptical sister, Reyhaneh, Amir begins tracking down the loose ends of his life before the war in a desperate attempt to find Moon Brow. Amir’s quest takes him from Tehran to the ravaged mountains of western Iran. There, his lost arm and the wedding ring it may have held could be the key to learning Moon Brow’s identity. Set in Iran before and after the revolution, Mandanipour’s novel is by turns comic and tragic, both a fantastic love story and a searing portrait of a nation caught between its past and future. Mandanipour’s story is imaginative and captivating.

Starred review from April 1, 2018

Written in the heightened language of dreams, if dreams were always so dark, this long-anticipated work from exiled Iranian award winner Mandanipour (Censoring an Iranian Love Story) features Amir Yamini, a young wastrel given to drinking, womanizing, and blasphemy, who shames his devout Iranian family and is finally carted off and flogged by the Revolutionary Guards. He ends up a soldier fighting against Iraq, is hit by shrapnel, and after losing an arm and much of his memory, is confined to the mental hospital from which his mother and sister rescue him after years of searching. Frustrated but loyal sister Reyhaneh is willing to help him recall his life and find Moon Brow, the woman he repeatedly envisions, her face hidden by the glow of a crescent moon, and the novel winds toward that goal through a labyrinth of gorgeously rendered scenes. These scenes are ingeniously imparted by two scribes: Amir's more manageable self, reputedly perched on his right shoulder, and a demonically angry self perched on his left, mirroring his split soul and that of his country. VERDICT Highly recommended for literary lovers.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2018
The ne'er-do-well scion of a Tehran merchant family emerges from war determined to recover what he lost--an arm, a lover, and crucial memories--in this multilayered, hypnotic tale.In 1980s Iran, Amir Yamini coolly plays the libertine until one relationship grows serious, then unravels badly. The devastated young man seeks numbness in alcohol, but his drunkenness brings a horrific flogging of 80 lashes. He then enlists in the military during the Iran-Iraq War without telling his family. An explosion takes his left arm and lands him in a hospital for shellshock victims, where his mother and sister find him after a five-year search and take him home. The novel actually starts at this point and soon reveals Amir's patchy memory and his obsession with finding his left arm to learn whether he was wearing a gold ring linked to his last lost love. History and politics, Islam and Morality Police permeate without overwhelming the narrative as it shifts between Amir's present and past. His relationship with his sister is also a rich, tender thread throughout. Mandanipour, an Iranian writer whose first novel in English, Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2009), elicited allusions to M.C. Escher and Rubik's Cube, does not do things simply here in his second, either. Sections alternate between a scribe "on his right shoulder" and one on his left, like good and bad angels, providing both omniscient narrative and Amir's first-person reveries. The device suggests Amir's unsteady grasp of reality, his own story, as his damaged, drifting mind tries to paste together dimly recalled shards of a broken life. The prose also reveals a writer in total control, easily moving from the banter of youth to lyrical or sensual flights befitting Amir's former liking for poetry and seduction, to Persian folktales or hallucinatory fever dreams from a brain unhinged by battle, medication, and remorse.A remarkable vision of the elusiveness of redemption and love.

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Starred review from March 1, 2018
Amir is a prisoner of both his body and his mind. Having lost an arm in battle during the Iran-Iraq war, he suffers from severe PTSD and spends most of his days confined to his stunning childhood home in Tehran, cared for by his long-suffering sister and parents. Plagued not only by memories of the war, Amir is also wracked by fading remembrances of a love he cannot place, a woman he nicknames Moon Brow. In dazzling flashbacks, Amir gradually pieces together the narrative of his past as a womanizing Casanova and a soldier who sees the horrific casualties of war up close. Mandanipour (Censoring an Iranian Love Story, 2010) uses this love story, ably translated by Sara Khalili, as the canvas for a larger picture of a country routinely disrupted by revolution and war. In a sense, Amir's fractured mind might just as well be a stand-in for Iran's own fragile history. The novel's halting narrative flow, alternating as it does between two scribes on Amir's left and right shoulders, respectively, is disorienting at first, but the patient reader will be rewarded with a dazzling mosaic of a troubled young man and a troubled yet gloriously rich nation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)