Man of My Time
A Novel
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
One of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2020. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.
"Finely wrought, a master class in the layering of time and contradiction that gives us a deeply imagined, and deeply human, soul." --Rebecca Makkai, The New York Times Book Review
From the bestselling author of The Septembers of Shiraz, the story of an Iranian man reckoning with his capacity for love and evil
Set in Iran and New York City, Man of My Time tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who is as alienated from himself as he is from the world around him. After decades of ambivalent work as an interrogator with the Iranian regime, Hamid travels on a diplomatic mission to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father, whose dying wish was to be buried in Iran.
Tucked in his pocket throughout the trip, the ashes propel him into a first-person excavation—full of mordant wit and bitter memory—of a lifetime of betrayal, and prompt him to trace his own evolution from a perceptive boy in love with marbles to a man who, on seeing his own reflection, is startled to encounter someone he no longer recognizes. As he reconnects with his brother and others living in exile, Hamid is forced to reckon with his past, with the insidious nature of violence, and with his entrenchment in a system that for decades ensnared him.
Politically complex and emotionally compelling, Man of My Time explores variations of loss—of people, places, ideals, time, and self. This is a novel not only about family and memory but about the interdependence of captor and captive, of citizen and country, of an individual and his or her heritage. With sensitivity and strength, Dalia Sofer conjures the interior lives of the “generation that had borne and inflicted what could not be undone.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
