Spijkerschrift

This book by Kader Abdolah can be seen from several perspectives, probably because that is how it was conceived: it can be seen as a contemporary history of Iran, including the last two or three generations; it can be seen as a study of the relationship of the protagonist Ismail with his deaf-mute father Akbar, or it can be seen as an expatriate's lament.

Abdolah (whose real name is Hossein Sadjadi Ghaemmaghami Farahani) is an Iranian who emigrated to the Netherlands in the late 1980s and writes in Dutch.

I don't know to what extent this book is autobiographical, but it appears to be to a large degree. It is written half and half between the writer and the character of Ismail.

It is an evocation of Ismail's own time in Iran, mainly in the 1950s-1970s, focusing on Akbar's life and thus reflecting the Iranian events of the 20th century.

Akbar never learned to read or write, but impressed by a much visited cuneiform engraving in a cave in the Saffron Mountain, he kept a lifelong diary that Ismail deciphers -without explanation- when he is already in the Netherlands.

A recommended reading, for being nostalgic among other reasons. I have the impression that Abdolah makes a mixture of Persian types and landscapes as if to present his country as a unit, and he succeeds.

I also see a heartfelt description of that mountain worship that some people suffer (or we suffer). From the beginning, he frequently mentions the Saffron Mountain which is not identified with any real feature and therefore somehow is symbolic of all mountains and appears in almost every chapter of the book.

Despite that misplacement, I have not resisted the temptation to give it shape and have come to the conclusion that it alludes to the Binalud Mountains, between Nishapur and Mashhad. It seems to me that it fits the descriptions and vicissitudes described and on the other hand this whole region is the largest saffron producer in the world (the good thing about this assumption is that Abdolah will hardly come to refute it).

Near the end, Ismail says: "The Dutch poet R. H. van den Hoofdakker is right when he talks about the mountains. Although I now live in the polder, I know that I have left my being, and that of my father, on those peaks, just as so many others have done".