Marina Nemat’s memoir of her experiences of Iran’s Islamic revolution is a laudably brave attempt to face up to horrors that most survivors “just don’t talk about”. Born in Tehran in 1965, she had a peaceful childhood: her father ran a dance school, her mother a beauty salon, and her family went on summer holidays to their cottage on the Caspian Sea. But her life changed when hardline clerics seized power in 1979.
When maths lessons were replaced with compulsory Quran study in her school, 16-year-old Marina, raised a Christian, complained. Before long, she was accused of plotting against the regime and carted off to the brutal Evin prison, where many of her friends had been sent before her. Interrogated, starved and tortured, she only escaped a death sentence by agreeing to marry a prison guard and converting to Islam.
Sadly, the book is of limited literary merit: Nemat’s descriptions are often clichéd and overwrought and her account of life before the revolution is one-dimensional. But given the horrors of what came after, it’s only natural for the memory of what existed before to be rose-tinted. If not as skilfully realised as it might have been, this is nonetheless an extraordinary story, and an important one.
