Aria
Nazanine Hozar
Knopf Canada, 2019
Review by Elina Taillon
In the years prior to the Iranian revolution, a baby girl is abandoned in an alleyway in Tehran. Found by a man who will become her adoptive father, her life is spared and her saga begins. Nazanine Hozar’s debut novel Aria (Knopf, 2019) follows not only protagonist Aria as she grows up in a society stratified by religion, class, and gender, but also a varied cast of others whose lives intersect with hers.
The book is divided into three parts, one for each mother figure in Aria’s life. When she is rescued from the street by Behrouz, an army driver, his discontented wife Zahra becomes her mother. Later, she is adopted by the rich and generous Fereshteh and leads a privileged life in which the primary source of contention is her compulsory service helping a certain Mrs. Shirazi—whose role is larger than she originally anticipates. As Aria grows, the political situation in Iran shifts and changes drastically over two decades, sweeping her and others’ lives in a powerful current.
Hozar’s deft and visual style captures the atmosphere of mid-20th century Tehran and the surrounding landscape. The story mixes humour with tragedy, beauty with pain; nuances abound in its lifelike evocations of character, place, and situation.
Though the story is told through many perspectives and over a long stretch of time, it is united by certain themes. Cultural and personal mythologies of the Alborz Mountains and the Simorgh (great phoenix) thread through the narrative as a complex motif that incorporates wonder, danger, and smallness in a vast universe. The rapidly shifting political climate sometimes elates characters, sometimes makes them angry or despondent. Regardless, its inexorable movements carry them along with it, one and all.
The use of space and distance not only orients the reader, but acts as its own symbolism—Pahlavi Street, the mountains, and the distant Caspian Sea all resonate with characters as meaningful markers in their lives. Though lyricism generally makes way for character, it reasserts itself most often in relation to the landscape:
“She moved to the kitchen window that looked out over the garden and for a moment watched the sprinkle of stars in the limitless Tehran sky. Of all the places she’d seen, even at the northern tip of the Swiss Alps, where her father had taken her as a child, she’d never seen stars like these: bold, intrusive, as though they wanted to penetrate the lives of the humans under the cloak of their shelter, rain down their constellations, and dictate the stories of their lives. To warn? To guide? She wondered. Or was it simply to amuse themselves with the errors of men?”
The three mother figures for which the sections of the book are named have complicated relationships to Aria and rich, troubled identities in their own right. Zahra perpetuates her childhood abuse on her new charge, despairing of Aria’s chances in such a cruel world. Fereshteh struggles with a lack of religious feeling; she is haunted by the belief that not being a ‘good enough’ Muslim caused her baby boy to die and endangers her adopted child, Aria. Mehri, broken by guilt and a sense of inferiority, cannot give enough to any of her daughters.
Though there are a fair number of male characters, women and their stories are at the forefront. A common thread of treacherous or absent men runs through their lives. When Fereshteh’s father goes missing in Russia, her mother follows, never to return. Husbands and fathers abandon their duties. A woman dresses in red for years so her absent lover will recognize her upon his (unlikely) return. According to Fereshteh’s servant, Masoomeh, “Love is a terrible thing, not what dreamers say it is”. It’s a testament to the fullness of Hozar’s character development that issues of motherhood, gender norms, and patriarchy affect the female and the equally well-rounded male characters in their day-to-day lives.
Aria herself is a locus at which people’s lives intersect, and she gains remarkable mobility through the class and religious strata. As such, she is an observer who never truly belongs anywhere. She clings to people rather than places, but people are never simple or stable. As a child, many things happen around her and for her, beyond her control; aside from occasional outbursts, she has been stripped of her agency by both society and circumstance. As she grows, she takes charge of her opinions and decisions in a fascinating display of mixed motivations and influences. Her role as a protagonist is unique and subtle; she is not entirely a hero or anti-hero, but a reflection of life.
In the same way, very few characters are portrayed as purely good or evil. This is more than the “people are complicated” baseline shared by many good books—in Aria, everyone is strongly influenced by their demographic and personal experience. Prejudice and contradiction in characters’ worldview is revealed subtly and organically, without condemning them. A rich boss treats a worker terribly while coddling the worker’s son; a doctor expresses both positive and negative views of women and those of a lower class. No one transcends the limits of their point of view, and this is clearly visible to the reader through the omniscient narration.
Through the labyrinth of characters and situations, several larger commentaries about life emerge. The aforementioned tyranny of love and the status of women are two such themes. Another is debt and owing. This takes several interrelated forms—financial debt, family debt, what is owed to society, what is owed to parents and children and friends. There is a contrast and comparison of financial and relational owing. Motherhood and childhood are also examined; the very structure of the novel provides many perspectives on this, including Aria’s sudden revelation that for her, “any mother is every mother”. The novel also explores trauma and how it perpetuates from one generation to the next, arises from nonconformity, or molds people during and long after violent events.
Aria presents an opportunity to explore the socio-political situation of pre-revolutionary Iran through feminist historical fiction. With a similar premise to politically framed family sagas such as those written by Gabriel García Márquez or Naguib Mahfouz, it finds its own unique voice and viewpoint. Including characters who are marginalized for their gender, sexuality, religion, and class gives readers a second look at this historical period. For those who enjoy lingering in wide-ranging, character-driven narratives with plenty to contemplate, it makes for a gratifying and moving read.
Elina Taillon is a current graduate student in UBC’s Creative Writing MFA and holds an MA in French Literature from U of T. She enjoys learning languages, petting cats, and brewing obscure loose leaf teas. In the future, she would like to publish many novels.