Ceyrone's Reviews > My Father's Notebook: A Novel of Iran

This is my first book by Kader Abdolah and it won’t be my last. I couldn’t put it down. The author is such a great storyteller. He masterly interweaves a story of a father and son with ancient tales and songs and then modern politics and the experience of exile. The novel is written in three parts. Part 1, told by an omniscient narrator, is the story of Aga Akbar and his son, Ishmael. Part 2 is told by Ishmael in the first-person. And Part 3 returns to the omniscient narrator to conclude the story. This structure allows the narrator to provide the back story of Aga Akbar and Ishmael while later allowing direct access to Ishmael’s interiority. It tells the story of Ishmael's deaf-mute father. His son, living abroad as a political refugee, receives his father's notebook after his death and starts to decipher the cuneiform characters. Highly recommend. Loved the cover of the version of the book that I read.

“A while later the oldest woman in the house brought Ishmael in her arms and took him in the guest room. No one spoke, because the first word, the first sentence to reach the baby’s unspoiled mind had to be a poem- an ancient melodic verse. Not a word uttered by a midwife or an aunt’s joyful cry, not an everyday word from the mouth of a neighbour, but a poem by Hafez, the medieval master of Persian poetry.”