City of Lies
Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran
-
-
4.0 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this intimate and unforgettable portrait of modern Tehran, a foreign affairs journalist reveals the extraordinary passions and intrigues hidden in the hearts of the city's most ordinary inhabitants.
Rich and absorbing, this book travels up and down Vali Asr Street, Tehran's pulsing thoroughfare, from the lavish shopping malls of Tajrish through the smog that lingers over the alleyways and bazaars of the city's southern districts.
Ramita Navai gives voice to ordinary Iranians forced to live extraordinary lives: the porn star, the aging socialite, the assassin and enemy of the state who ends up working for the Republic, the dutiful housewife who files for divorce, and the old-time thug running a gambling den.
In today's Tehran, intrigues abound and survival depends on an intricate network of falsehoods: mullahs visit prostitutes, local mosques train barely pubescent boys in crowd control tactics, and cosmetic surgeons promise to restore girls' virginity. Navai paints an intimate portrait of those discreet recesses in a city where the difference between modesty and profanity, loyalty and betrayal, honor and disgrace is often no more than the believability of a lie.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Navai, an award-winning journalist, examines a wide range of Tehranis in this collection of beautifully written profiles. She observes the lives of impoverished families as well as the "upper-crust." Her subjects often "composite character" based on several people span from young housewives to navigators of the underworld. They include a woman who is sold twice, first by her drug-addicted parents, then by her debtor husband, and another woman who watches morality police shut down her dancing class. When a man agrees to meet with a cryptic stranger, he finds himself face to face with the judge whose sentence destroyed his family but who now pleads for his forgiveness. Navai is especially drawn to tales of comeuppance, but she wisely balances violence and drama with domestic frustrations, fragmented marriages, opium addiction, and struggles with religious and cultural identity. The writing is filled with novelistic detail, but the beauty of the prose offers minor relief from the cruelties described. Navai asserts that, for all its complexities, Tehran the city of her birth is a place that she loves.
