My Part of Her

by Javad Djavahery, Emma Ramadan (Translator), Dina Nayeri (Introduction)

Overview

In exiled Iranian author Javad Djavahery’s captivating English debut, a youthful betrayal during a summer on the Caspian sea has far-reaching consequences for a group of friends as their lives are irrevocably altered by the Revolution.

For our unnamed confessor, the summer months spent on the Caspian Sea during the 1970s are a magically transformative experience. There, he is not the “poor relative from the North,” but a welcome guest at his wealthy cousin Nilou’s home and the gatekeeper of her affections. He revels in the power of orchestrating the attentions of her many admirers, granting and denying access to her would-be lovers. But in a moment of jealousy and youthful bravado, he betrays and humiliates an unlikely suitor, setting into motion a series of events that will have drastic repercussions for all of them as the country is forever transformed by the Iranian Revolution a few short years later.

Over the next twenty years, the lingering effects of that betrayal set the friends on radically different paths in the wake of political, religious, and cultural upheaval. Their surprising final reunion reveals the consequences of revenge and self-preservation as they each must decide whether and how to forget the past. Urgent and gorgeously written, My Part of Her captures the innocence of youth, the folly of love, and the capriciousness of fate as these friends find themselves on opposing sides of the seismic rifts of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632062437
Publisher:	Restless Books
Publication date:	02/11/2020
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Javad Djavahery was forced to leave Iran at the age of twenty, escaping to France as a political refugee. He has never returned to Iran and now lives in Paris. In addition to writing screenplays and producing films, he has written two short-story collections in Persian and two novels in French. My Part of Her is his English-language debut.

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, RI where she is the co-owner of Riffraff bookstore and bar. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim grant, an NEA translation grant, and a Fulbright fellowship for her translation work.

Dina Nayeri is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee, a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize. Her debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (2013), was translated into fourteen languages. Her second novel, Refuge (2017), was a New York Times editor’s choice. She holds a BA from Princeton, an MBA from Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and Teaching Writing Fellow. She lives in Paris, where she is a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“There will be no kowtowing to the Western reader in these pages. There is no room for that gaze, because this is a story about our part in Iran’s undoing. It is a collective reckoning with ourselves, with our part of her—the monster we created.

—From the Preface by Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee and Refuge

Editorial Reviews

01/20/2020

Djavahery’s mesmerizing English-language debut illustrates how betrayal can have far-reaching ramifications. Unfolding as the confessions of an unnamed narrator to a former prison cellmate, the events related take place during the idyllic summers of the narrator’s mid-1970s youth in Iran, ending with a coda set decades later. The narrator explains how, at 13, he parlayed his relationship with his beautiful 16-year-old cousin, Niloufar, into a role as her representative, meting out information about her in exchange for money and whiskey and, more importantly, for status within his circle of friends. He explains the heady, irresistible sense of empowerment and his eventual act of treachery, the stunning consequences of which are not revealed until the book’s conclusion. Against the backdrop of the final years of the Shah’s reign, Djavahery captures the innocence and hope embodied by young people on the verge of adulthood, the allure of the underground for burgeoning minds, and the rending apart of friends and family during the Islamic revolution in 1979. Driven by the narrator’s regretful voice, Djavahery’s excellent, gripping tale depicts misplaced, youthful ambition and the conflicts of changing social norms. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

This English-language debut of exiled Iranian novelist Djavahery captures the headiness of youth, with all its promise and peril, and displays how seemingly small actions can become pivotal moments when the world is turned on its head.”

—Booklist

Booklist

Djavahery’s mesmerizing English-language debut illustrates how betrayal can have far-reaching ramifications…. Driven by the narrator’s regretful voice, Djavahery’s excellent, gripping tale depicts misplaced, youthful ambition and the conflicts of changing social norms.”

From the Publisher

This English-language debut of exiled Iranian novelist Djavahery captures the headiness of youth, with all its promise and peril, and displays how seemingly small actions can become pivotal moments when the world is turned on its head.”

—Booklist

Booklist

★ 2019-11-10
Searing novel, by Iranian exile Djavahery, of love and betrayal in a time of revolution.

"If we were to have a reunion one day, it would have to take place in a cemetery." In his English-language debut, screenwriter/novelist Djavahery writes pensively of an unnamed young man, just 13 when we meet him, who is hopelessly smitten by his 16-year-old cousin, Niloufar, whose name means "water lily" in Farsi. She is beautiful, with long, black, curly hair and large eyes, and she swims like a dolphin in the cool waters of the Caspian Sea, carefree thanks to prosperous parents who are also members of the Communist Party: "Wealth, power, an elegant mother who looked like a Hollywood starlet…so different from the archetype of our mothers." Like a figure out of Homer, Nilou also happens to have numerous suitors, two in the lead, one as beautiful as she, the other a klutz with the demeanor of a "beaten dog" whom our narrator lures into a compromising situation that will forever shame him. Not even the arrival of another cousin, half Iranian and half German, who sports "the tiniest bikini on the south coast of the Caspian" can dim the ardor of the local boys for Nilou. Come the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini a few years later, and all those golden youth face doom. Called into service in the war that soon erupts with Iraq, some are squandered in suicide attacks while Nilou disappears, joining a leftist revolutionary group in Kurdistan, or so the narrator believes. A comrade eventually betrays her, as will her cousin, who, having also joined a Communist cell, decides that he cannot face the torture that is visited on him when he's captured. At times reminiscent of Giorgio Bassani's Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Djavahery's novel is an aching evocation of a paradise lost, one that is impossible to regain, even in our narrator's searching dreams.

Vivid, shattering, and utterly memorable.

Kirkus Reviews