Disoriental

Amir Chavoshi CC0 Creative Commons

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi

Told in the restless back and forth of a narrator who is haunted by the past as much as she is tempted by the idea of the future, Disoriental is a family saga, a tale of exile, and a story of pursuing one’s desires even in the face of familial or societal condemnation.

Born into a fabled, upper class family line in Iran, expected to be a rare and longed for blue-eyed son, Kimiâ Sadr is instead born another brown-eyed daughter. She grows up in an Iran simmering with political tensions, and adulates her father, Darius. While always aware of Darius’ political activism, it is nonetheless a shock to Kimiâ’s childhood sense of stability when the family must flee Iran for France in a treacherous, exhausting journey. Written with her screenwriter’s sensibility for flashbacks, shot angles, and jump cuts, author Négar Djavadi intersperses Kimiâ’s reflections on her early life within the frame narrative of an interminable time spent in the waiting room of a Parisian hospital’s fertility wing. Leaving the full story of this waiting room visit shrouded in just enough mystery, Djavadi invites the reader, in an almost chiding, laughing manner, to sit with the story as it unfolds, to bear with Kimiâ as the whole tale is laid out in all of its indivisible complexity, where the politics of family, state, and individual personality can never be entirely unbraided. An exciting, engrossing novel about Iran and the West, about childhood and adulthood, about queerness and partnership, and about the interplay between individual and community.

Subjects this book contains which some readers may be sensitive to: homophobia, assassination.