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About me
I had a perfect childhood: a loving, large family, all ready to interfere with the minutiae of everyday life. I read books and played soccer from morning till evening in the alley in the streets. Sometimes (when our parents were out), using a makeshift lighting, we continued late into the night—not my reading, but our soccer. I don't recall studying.
After completing primary school in Tehran, I was sent to the UK to complete my secondary education in a terrible boarding-school. Confusing years, and, contrary to most narratives I have read, a disappointing education that almost killed my love for reading. I moved to the US to study engineering. There, university rekindled my curiosity in literature.
My artist wife and I have raised two daughters. After the 1979 revolution, we chose to live and work in the US, except for a sabbatical year in the nineties living in Tehran. We live in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and continue to visit Iran often, keeping close contact with family and friends. Home continues to evade us.
About the installation
For a number of years, I had the idea that I would photograph the top shelves of my library, where the eye cannot see the titles, and print them on a rolling, white window shade. Like on a window, I would then affix the rollers on the lower shelves. By rolling them up and down, I would have access to the titles of both lower and upper shelves. It worked wonderfully. People visiting me never noticed if the shades were up or down. Like an owl butterfly, the prints acted like a perfect camouflage among the real books.
It crossed my mind that I could decorate the whole library with these shades and no one would notice. Books behind books, so to speak. But wait, why not put something interesting behind these shades? Decorate the real books. Then I began to imagine how that would work. I would have to have a very exacting printer. I would have a large photo that I admired and superimpose the photo on a photo of the shelf of books. That done, I would take individual photos of each volume and cut and print the portion of the photo for each book, then bind the book such that the back of the book had that part of the original picture that I admired. I chose a Gerome painting, with its vibrant colors, and superimposed it on roughly twenty books. It took me a while but it worked.
The year of COVID turned me loose on my library. A series of trompe l'oeil ideas began to germinate. I faux bound books to look like antiques. I went industrial on using the Gerome technique by superimposing large pictures on multiple shelves from floor to ceiling, where each book is bound with a small part of a large image. Back-breaking work but rewarding. You can see the use of French comics of my childhood. Not to be accused of having a library and not knowing the titles of the books, every shelf has a shade with the corresponding books printed that rolls down to match the decorated books behind it.
I began also playing with the physical books: Flying books high up, books arranged in a wave seemingly floating in the air, shelves supporting books without the horizontal board. I superimposed a horizontal picture of books on a shelf of vertical books. I built, with the help of a local printer, a four-foot Tintin book (Les Bijoux de la Castafiore). It worked.
Finally, the image on the right is where I peel off the technique for all to see on the lowest right shelf, where all signatures belong.
It gave me a sense of play during the dark year. I call it an installation because this house will eventually be sold as a tear down; something magical when it doesn't exist anymore.
About writing a novel
I attended the UNH graduate writing program well over 35 years ago. My professor, Thomas Williams (winner of NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS 1975), advised me to write short stories before attempting a novel. "Novels can drown you if you are not an experienced swimmer." Boy was he right. My second short story, the Mirror Triptych, got hold of me (just the title should have been a warning). And twenty-five years later comes this novel.
My goals began nobly enough. I wrote to remind the young of the contrast between the high-mindedness of the 1906 revolution and the cynical power grab of the 1979 revolution; a protest against a regime that has tried to create a break in the continuity of our history by attempting to erase art and culture.
Inexperience fed the structure and, when young, oh, what a tangled web we can weave. Going out was easy. To bring it home safely took a lifetime's experience. It is a complex novel, no doubt, but I promise it does not end with shortcuts. I am still hounded by the feeling that I might have a loose end. None of my readers have found any. It is not a who-done-it but a why-done-it. Three "I" narrators -- a mad surgeon of the late Shah, an obese tea room owner, and a gay scion of an aristocratic family -- all tell the story of the Poonaki family.
Michael Ondaatje writes, “The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’" When writing in a different culture, the usual difficulties around names and places make the first fifty pages sometimes difficult. Please persevere. There is order here.
About the still-life photography
This series of still-life photos began with my fascination with Dutch still-life paintings, in particular Pieter Claesz's work. Besides the aesthetic question, the more I looked at them, the more I wanted to understand the reason the artists chose a certain angle over another. Why place certain objects in the vicinity of one another? From these studies grew a series of still-life photographs that took my own themes. The effect I am after is completely decorative. I perused the antique shops of Boston, London, Amsterdam, and Tehran, looking at first for elements that mimicked the Dutch masters. My first few attempts were putting together the homage to Claesz by reproducing the "Turkey Pie" and the "Still Life with Cheese". Asking a pie shop to bake an inedible pie from a photograph, or asking my wife to paint a roll of cheese for a darker hue effect, began a sort of mania for detail that entailed half the fun.
The chase for finding objects that deliver an aesthetic combination took on a life of its own. It brought on sometimes comic situations. In trying to keep the coals of an opium tray aglow while photographing it, I inadvertently set fire to my mother-in-law’s dining table. Looking for the exact Russian mushrooms loved by Nabokov in his childhood, or his favorite copy of Russian “War and Peace”, had me perusing the internet, markets, and book stores for days. Bargaining with the astounded fish monger in downtown Tehran for the head of a Sturgeon had us both giggling like schoolboys.