V.S. Naipaul, in Among the Believers, takes a whistlestop tour through the Middle East, writing about the tension between the dynamic societies of the West, embracing new and revolutionary technology, and the static Islamic societies, holding onto tradition. That basic tension is present in Gina Nahai’s new novel, Caspain Rain, only in sociological form. The novel, although it tells an intergenerational story, focuses on a progressive young woman trapped in an Islamic marriage to a man who is in love with another woman. The woman is infected with Western sensibilities – she wants to work outside the home, not to be a housewife, she wants to ignore the class gap between herself and her husband’s relatives and friends – but social mores restrict her.
It is, through and through, a sad novel, though not a hopeless one. There are upswells of progress, but these are mostly transient gains. Nahai unswervingly depicts Iranian society in all of its bickering, class-snobby, ugliness – the prohibitions against dance, the refuge-taking Nazi’s, the Jews trying to gain traction in an Arab society – but also shows a protagonist gamely fighting against these things. It is the size of the fight which redeems the depressing conditions of the novel.
Caspain Rain felt like part The Awakening, with a deeply unhappy woman trapped inside a marriage, and part The Unbearable Lightness of Being, with a woman refusing to leave her husband or be cowed by his unfaithfulness. Add in a heavy dose of Iranian society – even a Muslim/Zoroastrian feud (where else would you find that, eh?) – and the reader gets an excellence portrait of the condition of an oppressed woman in an Islamic state.
For an excerpt, head over to Nahai’s website.
One thought on “Gina Nahai – Caspain Rain”
I found this book very dull and poorly written. I think Nahai is one of the weaker writers in the Iranian genre, I have to say. The best so far has been Porochista Khakpour, in my opinion. I read her recent debut (released same time as Nahai, I believe) with the strange title Sons & Other Flammable Objects, after seeing favorable reviews in New York Times and the New Yorker. It is the writing there that does the work, not just a passed-along family story.