Review: "The Blind Owl" by Sadegh Hedayat

The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, perhaps the most popular novel to come out of Iran, is not really the best book to be reading while on a plane. I started and finished this 130-page book while waiting for my flight back home from Vegas and on the plane home. I was able to absorb most of it in the less than stellar setting, but it is a book much more suited for well-lighted and less noisy places. While it is a short book, it packs a lot of ideas into its short page count, a lot of creepy and bleak ideas. This book is obviously in line with a lot of shorter books just like it such as Notes from the Underground and Nausea, but it is very much a novel of horror and it approaches this feeling through the main character’s sadness and impossible longing for a woman who might not even exist. I read somewhere that this book isn’t so much about an experience but is an experience itself, and in that it succeeds. There is not really much of a plot synopsis, because it is never made clear what is real and what is a dream, or better yet a nightmare. It follows an unnamed pen case decorator who views the most beautiful woman through a hole in the wall of his house and spends the rest of the book talking about his fleeting happiness and his embrace of life’s meaninglessness and the specter of death. What this book gets right is a certain feeling that most of us have felt: the feeling of seeing someone out in public whose so beautiful you can’t approach them. You remember that person forever but never see them again. This is not a good feeling in Hedayat’s eyes. It is one of nightmarish proportions, it is a feeling that gets our character laughed at, to reflect on his regrets and too be trapped in a nightmare. This isn’t the happiest book, (with Hedayat eventually committing suicide), but it is filled to the brim with passion and insight that is not easy to dismiss, even if we desperately wanted too.

Rating: 4/5