Simultaneous with the overthrow of the Shah by Islamic militants, nine-year-old Shirin Amin’s life is thrown into a Kafkaesque decline, as her father Issac is jailed and tortured by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and her mother’s carefree and luxurious life and material trappings are both literally and figuratively torn apart. The prosperous Amin family, Jewish, yet not religious, is guilty of a crime that is unforgivable in Ayatollah-ruled Iran: they had lived a life of luxury, doing business and fraternizing with the aristocracy during the rule of the Shah, rendering them despicable and deserving of punishment in the eyes of the recently empowered Mullahs and their followers.
In The Septembers of Shiraz, Dalia Sofer has, with extraordinary skill, woven together a cast of characters replete with endearing qualities and rife with character flaws and shortcomings. It is through these characters that Sofer conveys the yearning of a people for a country that exists only in their memories of its smells, sounds, and faded photographs. Juxtaposing the experiences and reactions of the Amin family members, the reader sees the plight through the eyes of Shirin, her mother Farnaz, her imprisoned father, Issac, and her teenage brother, who has been sent to New York to study architecture. Along with the unraveling of the life of the Amin family we view the unraveling of the country of Iran.
In this powerful and timely first novel, Sofer brilliantly portrays the impact of having religious fanaticists and extremists control a country. While Sofer’s characterizations evoke great sympathy for the plight of the Amin family, she does not portray them as without fault. Indeed, as part of the privileged few under the Shah’s regime, they had enjoyed the benefits of wealth while often being oblivious to those less fortunate. Sofer’s observations about the tenous nature of our lives and our inability to anticipate our own destiny, while delivered subtly, are quite poignant.
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