Man of My Time

February 1, 2020
Iran's brutal and tragic years of upheaval are evoked through a one-time revolutionary's rueful reflections. Hamid Mozaffarian has arrived in New York City at a cold and lonely phase of his life. Having served almost three decades interrogating those considered enemies of the Iranian government, he is now helping his country's minister for foreign affairs deal with "a tiff" between their navy and the Americans in the Persian Gulf. Hamid's diplomatic mission enables him to reestablish contact with his mother and brother, from whom he'd been estranged since they exiled themselves to America after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He agrees to their request to carry, in a mint candy tin, the ashes of his father, who'd died two weeks earlier, so they can be scattered back in Iran. In the meantime, while in New York, Hamid struggles to come to grips with choices he's made that have also left him alienated from his wife and daughter back home. A sensitive, artistic boy fascinated by the vulnerability of glass objects, Hamid grew up bewildered by his scholarly father's distant, sometimes severe behavior toward him. Young Hamid was likewise bemused by his father's shift from opposing the shah to working for him. His father explained: "Slowly, slowly I became the system." Ironically, the same became true for Hamid, as he reached his young manhood as an idealistic revolutionary seeking the shah's overthrow. Soon he proved himself dedicated to the Ayatollah Khomeini's republic by carrying out an appalling act of betrayal against his father, and over the succeeding decades he became deeply entrenched in his country's draconian system of dispensing justice. One is often tempted while reading this novel to think of Hamid as little more than an introspective species of monster. But Sofer (The Septembers of Shiraz, 2007) brings compassion, insight, and acerbic humor to her depiction of a man at once too intelligent to altogether ignore the consequences of his behavior yet helpless to withstand the turbulent momentum of history. A perceptive, humane inquiry into Iran's history and soul.

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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.

Starred review from March 15, 2020
In her powerful second novel, Sofer (The Septembers of Shiraz, 2007) portrays a man whose principles have estranged him from his loved ones. Hamid Mozaffarian is an interrogator for the Iranian government, a position that neither his days as a sensitive child who loved marbles and toy trains nor his youth as a passionate revolutionary portended. When we meet Hamid, he is in New York on a diplomatic mission and has just been given the ashes of his father, Sadegh, whom he'd not spoken to for nearly four decades. Sadegh was an emotionally closed-off scholar who fled Iran with Hamid's mother and brother, Omid, in the late 1970s when the ayatollah returned; his final wishes were for Hamid to scatter his ashes back in the homeland from which he was exiled. Hamid's mother leaves him no choice in the matter, and accepting his father's ashes forces Hamid to not only reconnect with the brother he hasn't seen in years, but also face the many sins of his past, which ended up forcing his family to leave Iran. A gorgeously written character study that examines, with sensitivity and pathos, the small steps that lead a man down an unexpected and ultimately isolating path.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2020

As this novel of modern Iran opens, Hamid Mozaffarian is on a diplomatic mission to New York, where he meets the exiled family he hasn't seen since 1979 and is given a portion of his father's ashes to scatter in Iran. This sudden reconnection with his past leads Hamid to reevaluate a life that has taken him from a happy, artistic childhood to work as an interrogator for the intelligence agency of a regime that tolerates little dissent. What he discovers is a life made up of lies and betrayals, as he enlists his fellow revolutionaries to confiscate his father's life's work--notes and manuscript for a history of Persian art--and condemns to death a talented cartoonist he admired (and whom his father also once betrayed in the days of the Shah). His literal self-exile has also resulted in a failed marriage and his daughter's disaffection. VERDICT Through the pain of Hamid's alienation, Sofer (The Septembers of Shiraz), an Iranian-born Jew who grew up in the United States, has created a memorable and difficult character who can be seen as embodying the spiritual distress of Iran since the 1978 revolution. A powerful, complex, and profoundly anguished novel made more relevant by current tensions. [See Prepub Alert, 10/7/19.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2019

After The Septembers of Shiraz, a PEN/Robert Bingham Prize winner and multi-award finalist, Sofer returns with the story of Iranian Hamid Mozaffarian. Having tamped down conflicted feelings to work as an interrogator for the Iranian regime, Hamid meets his cold-shouldering family while in New York on a diplomatic mission and receives his father's ashes for burial in Iranian soil. Carrying around those ashes and struggling to reestablish ties with his exiled family, Hamid must examine how he's become "the beautiful, indignant thug" he barely recognizes.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.