No redemption guaranteed when the revolution ends
I know I’m not the only one who has woken up in a pre-dawn panic, fretting about this pandemic. Lately, I worry it will forever change not just our health, but who we are. Will we forever be marked by isolation, distrust and anxiety?
With the pandemic as my reading context, I can’t help but view Dalia Sofer’s “Man of My Time” as an exploration of how political and social upheavals leave their marks on entire generations, and irrevocably alter those involved.
Ms. Sofer, whose first novel, “The Septembers of Shiraz,” won a PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize and was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award, sets her second novel in contemporary Iran and New York City, and traces the life of narrator Hamid Mozaffarian from childhood to adulthood.
There’s a curious doubling between Hamid’s story and that of his father, Sadegh, a stern man who never made much time for family, and who“relinquished” integrity” when he named an artist friend an enemy of the government, and then took a job with that same government. “Slowly, slowly, I became the system,” Sadegh admits. In his free time, he obsessively worked on an encyclopedia documenting Iranian art from the beginning of time, as if the intellectual project would redeem his prior betrayal.
Hamid sets out to distinguish himself from his father, but makes many of the same mistakes. Hamid joins leftist street protests during the Iranian Revolution, spouts anti-government sentiments, and plasters Tehran with a graffiti cartoon figure he calls “Everyman Jamshid.” During a cross-country motorcycle trip, Hamid meets a seminary man in Qom who gives him a cassette tape sermon (we presume by then-exiled Ayatollah Khomeini). He soon does an about-face, and attends protests on behalf of the Islamic Revolution.
It’s not clear whether Hamid mindfully trades a secular vision of social justice for a religious one, but his alignment with the Islamic Revolution allows him to survive the tumultuous climate. Hamid takes it one step further and asks the revolutionary guard to raid his father’s apartment and take the massive encyclopedia draft — his life’s work. (It’s the ultimate farce that an art encyclopedia should threaten the new political order.) Soon after, Hamid’s family leaves Iran for New York, but Hamid opts to stay in Iran, and severs family ties for decades. Hamid, more aligned with the state than ever, echoes the same sentiments of his father years prior: “Slowly, slowly I’ve become the system.”
Are the sins of the father visited, even intensified, on the son? Is
Hamid merely a victim of circumstance — a sordid man of his time? Years later, on a business trip to New York City, Hamid is contacted by his mother, who informs him that his father, from whom he’s been estranged for 38 years, has died. Hamid is asked to take his father’s ashes and bury them in Iran.
Readers will be hardpressed to sympathize with Hamid: He does horrible things to those who love him most. Ms. Sofer’s lyrical, underline-worthy sentences contrast with Hamid’s lack of remorse and awareness.
There are hints of selfawareness and redemption: Hamid confesses to betraying his father and tries to make amends with his estranged daughter Golnaz. She accepts her father’s peace offering but acknowledges it’s too little, too late: “The problem of your generation ... is that it suffered too much and inflicted too much suffering. There isn’t any way for us to undo that history. We’re all trapped inside it.” Reflecting on his misdeeds, Hamid doesn’t take responsibility, but instead blames them on external forces: “we were a skipped generation, a hiccup in history.”
Much of the novel’s dark humor and thoughtfulness come from the deep disconnect between what we intuit about Hamid, and what he admits about himself. There are moments where those fractures are apparent (“What I failed to see ... was that my father, too, as all men, had all along been constructing a chronicle of himself.” The novel’s most poignant insight derives from the irony that we as readers are trapped in a chronicle of a man who lacks self-awareness.
Revolutions oust old orders and usher in new ones, but at incredible personal costs. Reading this novel amidst a pandemic intensifies its warning that we resist becoming, like Hamid and his father, people of “our time,” people trapped and skipped over.