Then the Fish Swallowed Him

by Amir Ahmadi Arian

Overview

An critically-acclaimed Iranian author makes his American literary debut with this powerful and harrowing psychological portrait of modern Iran—an unprecedented and urgent work of fiction with echoes of The Stranger, 1984, and The Orphan Master’s Son—that exposes the oppressive and corrosive power of the state to bend individual lives.

Yunus Turabi, a bus driver in Tehran, leads an unremarkable life. A solitary man since the unexpected deaths of his father and mother years ago, he is decidedly apolitical—even during the driver’s strike and its bloody end. But everyone has their breaking point, and Yunus has reached his.

Handcuffed and blindfolded, he is taken to the infamous Evin prison for political dissidents. Inside this stark, strangely ordered world, his fate becomes entwined with Hajj Saeed, his personal interrogator. The two develop a disturbing yet interdependent relationship, with each playing his assigned role in a high stakes psychological game of cat and mouse, where Yunus endures a mind-bending cycle of solitary confinement and interrogation. In their startlingly intimate exchanges, Yunus’s life begins to unfold—from his childhood memories growing up in a freer Iran to his heartbreaking betrayal of his only friend. As Yunus struggles to hold on to his sanity and evade Saeed’s increasingly undeniable accusations, he must eventually make an impossible choice: continue fighting or submit to the system of lies upholding Iran’s power.

Gripping, startling, and masterfully told, Then the Fish Swallowed Him is a haunting story of life under despotism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062946294
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	03/24/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	533,904
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Amir Ahmadi Arian started out as a journalist in Iran in 2000 and has since published a collection of stories, a nonfiction book, and two novels in Persian. He also translated from English to Persian novels by E.L Doctorow, Paul Auster, P.D. James, and Cormac McCarthy. Since leaving Iran in 2011 to complete a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Queensland, Australia, he has published short stories and essays in Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He currently lives in New York where he earned an MFA in the NYU Creative Writing Program as The Axinn Foundation/E.L. Doctorow Fellowship recipient, and teaches literature and creative writing at CUNY City College.

Editorial Reviews

The strangeness and physicality with which Arian depicts Yunus's prison life makes for a convincing, unnerving read…Arian offers straightforward and astute observations about Iran's attitude toward Western powers and about the social history of modern Tehran. His insights into the lives of the city's poor at a time of mounting inequality, and on the effects of sanctions and Western media on average Iranians, are gripping…This novel is an uncomfortable deep dive into the belly of a beast that swims in every sea.

The New York Times Book Review - Dina Nayeri

★ 05/04/2020

Arian’s hard-hitting English-language debut follows bus driver Yunus Turabi and his breakdown subsequent to a union strike—resulting in a devastating stint in prison. Yunus, 44, lives alone in Tehran. When he bumps into coworker Behrouz at a grocery store, Behrouz invites him to his house for dinner—and to join the union. Yunus then participates in a strike that turns violent, with the police and protestors clashing. The next day, in a state of despair over the fighting and a longing for human connection, he decides to drive his route anyway. When the passengers crowd and harass each other and a boy calls Yunus and the other bus drivers “sleazy assholes” who refuse to do their jobs, Yunus beats him nearly to death. The boy turns out to be the son of a minister, and Yunus is sentenced to four years in prison. During this time, he recalls his affair with Behrouz’s wife, who cut things off abruptly. When he’s finally released, he’s broken and adrift, having falsely confessed to masterminding the protest. Arian blends sharp, journalistic observations of Tehran’s politics and street scenes with a deeply empathetic portrait of Yunus’s troubled interior life. This is an essential work of contemporary Iran. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

An important new novel, not-to-be-missed... A sharply observed, painfully intimate and illuminating vision of Iran that will be invaluable to readers.

Joyce Carol Oates

Then the Fish Swallowed Him had me gripped from the start, I couldn’t turn away. A story about power and the way it can hold us in its cruel grasp. This is a novel of our times. Revealing, dark and illuminating, beautiful and tense.” 

Christy Lefteri

Then the Fish Swallowed Him is a gripping, intelligent novel, opening vistas of the imagination with economy and insight. Harrowing and clear as a bell.

Isabella Hammad

I found Amir Arian’s Then the Fish Swallowed Him a strange and startling vision written with the ferocity of an endangered artist and the lyric eloquence of a master. The world conjured up in these pages will haunt the reader with a real, palpable but entertaining dread much like the Iranian classic, The Blind Owl. It is a debut of genuine brilliance and wit.

Chigozie Obioma

In this stunning work, Arian accomplishes a rare feat by telling a captivating story of an unforgettable character and by bearing witness to the hard truths endured by political prisoners everywhere.” 

Booklist (starred review)

★ 2019-12-23
A Tehran bus driver is arrested during a strike, making him a pawn of Iranian politics and a victim of cruel imprisonment.

Yunus, the narrator of this brisk and piercing protest novel, is a demure middle-aged man who's striven to keep the turmoil of Iranian politics at arm's length: The 1979 revolution was overshadowed by his father's death and his mother's ensuing depression and maybe suicide. So he's blithely confident his participation in a 2005 drivers' strike can only be perceived as a reasonable plea for better treatment, not part of a global insurrection against the Ahmadinejad regime. What's the harm of reading Foucault and Marx with fellow union members? Plenty, the regime believes, and after Yunus beats a young counterprotester in a fit of anger, he's arrested, sent to Tehran's fearsome Evin prison, and told his victim was the son of the transportation minister. Whether the allegation is true or not, Yunus' prison stint becomes an unjust torment of beatings, forced confessions, and the slow-creeping madness of solitary confinement. (In one well-turned, poignant scene, he pleads with a fly not to abandon him.) This novel, the first in English by the Iranian-born Arian, is scaffolded with familiar tropes of kangaroo courts, false statements, and good-cop, bad-cop routines. But the author writes about Yunus' plight with a plainspoken, lacerating intensity. Moreover, Yunus is a richly imagined character who reckons with the consequences of his political ignorance and an ill-advised affair that's used as further ammunition against him. A few books and some bad judgment do not an enemy of the state make, but Arian expertly tracks Yunus' gears' turning from anger to depression to self-judging. Yunus' mental disorientation is as punishing as his beatings and, as the closing pages show, leaves lasting harm.

A distressing, smartly interior tale of the horrors sown by oppressive politics.

Kirkus Reviews

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