The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar…a quietly beautiful book for Women in Translation Month 2025…for the Historical Fiction Challenge 2025

How is it that you can make people stay somewhere they want to leave, and make people leave who want to be there? (p. 111)

In 1979, when Shida Bazyar begins her novel, I was a senior in high school. I was not concerned with politics, or religion, or being oppressed by my government. I knew little of the terror under which other people in the world were living by the so-called leaders of their country, although I did know of the Shah. Of the Iranians holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, under Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran begins with the perspective of Behzad. He is a young revolutionary in Iran, working against the Shah’s regime with his friends Peyman and Sohrab. He is in love with beautiful Nahid, who will only look down, demurely, when he tries to make a connection with her. 

When I look at her, because I can’t help it, because there is no other face in this room and in this country that I want to look at so much, she quickly looks elsewhere, as if her head had never been turned to this corner of the room where I am sitting and waiting, and there is a little smile on her lips, as intelligent and proud as the rest of her. (p. 55)

When Peyman is arrested, Behzad knows it is time for him as well; surely his name is on some list, too.

We follow the story to 1989, this time from Nahid’s perspective. She is a young mother now, living in East Germany, an Iranian in exile. How ironic, I think, to go from the oppression in Iran to the oppression of communism in East Germany. (I lived in Germany when the Berlin Wall was still up. I know what it was like there.) But there, at least, she has freedom to dress as she chooses, to make friends with the neighbors and mothers of her children’s school friends. Yet freedom has a price. What if her daughter chooses to sit in boys’ laps, to sit laughing on a wall, wearing bright colored leggings?

Then I think that I never want to walk down here and see my Laleh sitting by the fountain. My Laleh on a boy’s lap, without the love from Hafez’s words. It’s lucky that my Laleh will never be an adult here, and I’ll never lose her to a fountain and brightly colored leggings; by the time she’s that age, we’ll be back, Khomeini will be dead, everything will be different, everything better, and until then I will keep saying no when she asks for chewing gum - that might be how it all starts, first she starts chewing gum, and in a few years she’ll want to sit by the fountain in brightly colored leggings. (p. 102)

And now this daughter, Laleh, is telling us of taking a trip back to Tehran in 1999. Her little sister moves her head to the sound coming from her Sony Walkman; her brother, Mo, puts down his Game Boy to have his passport photo taken. She tucks her hair back under the hajib she must wear now that she is no longer living in the “freedom” of East Germany. Freedom…what a relative word.

The nights are quiet in Tehran. The days, so loud. The people in the house so loud, talking so loudly about unimportant things and hesitating so loudly about unimportant things. Their laughter so loud, the names they call out so loud, the way they say those polite sentences so loud, throwing them out like breathing, their presence so loud, fabric-swathed bodies in a protected space, the clatter of crockery so loud, as they cook, eat drink tea - a constant silvery, dry clatter of one thing against another. (p. 141)

It is Mo’s turn to continue the story, in the year 2009. He is living a college student’s life in Germany: drinking too much, sleeping too little, while unrest abounds. He witnesses the upheaval arising from the Iranian presidential election, during which protesters demand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be removed from office because they see it as a fraudulent election. (Is there any country which doesn’t accuse the leader of being fraudulently elected?! We face it ourselves, in America, which I had once believed to be fair and true…almost above reproach.)

It has taken me several days to read this book of only 266 pages, for the concepts of oppression and freedom, family and individuality, are so familiar. They are themes so applicable to any of the decades which have gone before us, and they will be applicable to those yet to come. We have much to learn from our mistakes, and it is difficult to hope that peace is attainable.

Thank you to Scribe Publications for sending me this gorgeous book. I’m so glad you brought it to us, to me.

On The Calculation of Volume II by Solvej Balle “…I was never going to be able to escape from the eighteenth of November.”

…I go on writing, conscious that my loose sheets of paper may contain my last hope that this fault in time is only temporary, the hope that the next sheet will never be filled, because time will return to normal and there will be no more eighteenths of November to write about. (p. 65)

When I read On Calculation of Volume I, I couldn’t understand the parameters of Tara Selter’s new life. She wakes up to the eighteenth of November over and over and over again. Her husband is shocked when she comes home, much like Lucy’s siblings in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when Lucy comes back from the visiting Mr. Tumnus. “I’m here,” she shouted. “I’m here. I’ve come back. I’m all right.” But, time is a funny thing; in some ways it isn’t the same for everyone. 

“So,” I thought, if Tara is living the same day on repeat, aren’t the people around her living the same day, too? Now I see, with On The Calculation of Volume II, that there is a fault in time. And Tara is the only one who is aware of it. 

She constructs seasons for herself, with the help of a meteorologist she has met. She travels to different cities to meet the longing she has for different seasons. Stockholm in November is Winter. To encounter Spring she travels to London where the names of foods in her grocery cart will have to suffice: spring greens, spring onions and a plastic tub of spring soup. 

I left the shop clutching a little bagful of spring, not much, but enough for me to feel that I was in the right track. (p. 105)

Early Summer is found on a beach in Montpellier, where there is sun in the middle of the day. Tara has begun a seasons book, as she calls it, where she records the places she has visited and the temperatures there. (Later, when her bag containing this green, cloth covered notebook is stolen, I can’t help but think of the irony that the seasons themselves have been stolen from her.)

It occurs to Tara, in Düsseldorf, that she cannot make time change. She cannot make it speed up to where she wants it to be.

You can’t jump-start a year however closely you follow the meteorologists’ graphs and calculations and you can’t construct a year out of fragments of November. It cannot be done. I try not to think about years. It isn’t easy, but now I will think about days. (p. 139)

How much do the months, and days, govern our lives?  

What is time, anyway? 

Here there is only a neutral, gentle November day, because my time is not a circle, and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a pool, a vessel, a container. It is a backyard with a medlar tree and autumn sunshine. Coffee and sunshine on a day in November. Danke. (p. 146)

Maybe, what Balle is hinting at, is that time is now. The moment you are currently enjoying. The place where you are currently living. The life you are currently experiencing. I know it has done me little good to wish for what was, or to wonder what will be. That’s no way to live, either. 

My search is no longer a hunger, it is not a longing or an urge. I frequent lecture halls and cafeterias, museums and libraries, and when the day is over I go back to my place. I let myself in and I know: I will never find the explanations I seek. I will only find new questions and new answers. (p. 183)

This is as appropriate an ending I can find to a book’s premise which encompasses time. Place. Connection. Meaning. What do we know? We can only find new questions and new answers, and, I think, accept the moment in which we dwell.

Sunday Salon: We’re Sitting on Hell’s Front Porch

Do not be deceived that this cool and shadowed path is what I am enjoying this Summer. It has been above 90 degrees for what feels like most of July, and I am chafed and irritable. As much as I dislike the Halloween displays all around me in Walgreen’s and Jewel, which have completely bypassed the Back to School displays, I am ready for Autumn.

Does this picture from last October not appeal?

Lest I continue complaining, I will share some highlights of the week. It was my parents’ 70th wedding anniversary. As I found it impossible to find cards for celebrating so many years, I put together this little olive tree for them. They don’t need things, but we do need to be reminded of life. Of growth.

I had fun celebrating Bullet Journal Day on August 8, with the Livestream hosted by Ryder Carroll and Jessica Chang. I felt honored to have my question chosen to be addressed. But, at the end of the day, I find myself needing to journal as I have always done: record my thoughts, feelings, and events for memory and clarity. I do not like to dwell on Habit Trackers, Gratitude Logs, Daily/Weekly/Monthly Reflections. Too much navel gazing is not good for me. I much prefer a Highlight/Insight page at the end of each journal.

And reading? I have had a lovely time reading On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. The Shadow Jury for the International Booker Prize deemed this the worthy winner, and while it did not officially win, I wholeheartedly concur. I was fortunate to find On The Calculation of Volume II at our library, and I will be reviewing them both in the week to come.

May your week ahead be blessed. May you be cooler than I am. May you find lovely things to write about. And, find more about others’ week at Sunday Salon here.

It’s Bullet Journal Day, and Ryder Carroll Answered My Question on His Livestream

I have loved to journal since I learned to write. Before Social Media was even a thing, and long before Bullet Journal was born, before I could spell “Winnipeg” on the train trip I took with my Grandmother at the age of five, I was recording my thoughts and adventures in whatever notebook I could find.

It was not only easy to do, it was necessary to my peace. I have never had to find a routine, or be consistent. I simply had to write.  

Then came the awareness of Travelers Factory Company notebooks. Paper Republic journals. Hobonichi Techos. I went down the journaling rabbit hole revealed to me on Instagram and now have an embarrassing large collection of each brand. (This photo shows only a part.)

Don’t get me wrong. Each vegetable tanned journal, or limited edition cover, each size of Traveler’s Notebook, has been a joy.  I have taken them to Switzerland, Italy and Japan. I have written in my own quiet study. And I have kept awake into the night pondering which I should use consistently.

Then came the Bullet Journal. What an idea! Record your thoughts in bullets! Now they are categorized into an acronym for NAME: N (Note), A (Action), M (Mood), and E (Event).  It’s easy to capture what is happening, how you are feeling, what you are thinking or doing with a simple bullet point.

But, where does the journaling I’ve done all my life come in? How can I adapt the speed of my pen, which matches the speed of my thoughts, to a single point? And so, while listening to the Bullet Journal Livestream today, I asked this question:

“How can I incorporate long form journaling, which may examine feeling too much? (I have journaled in long form for decades, and it is my preferred method of journaling.)”

I was amazed when I saw my question appear on the screen. Apparently, it was deemed worthy of answering…

The first thing Jessica Chang said, after she read it out loud, was that it sounded like a lot of self judgement was going on. (Imagine her discerning that from the first part of my question alone!) But then, Ryder answered it like this (paraphrased):

Bullet points anchor myself. What is most alive for me? I can unpack it in a long form entry. Long form journaling can be immensely valuable, but it is too time consuming for me…Long form journaling is getting an idea of what’s happening; get to the purpose of why.

I realized that Ryder’s ADHD has required him to journal one way, and I journal in a completely other way. But, that is the beauty of his system: it is flexible enough to adapt to the journaler’s needs. And, I loved how he suggested that those who keep a bujo need to determine why something is going on, and why they are reacting to it in a certain way. What changes need to be made to meet your intentions? 

There was so much meaningful content in this livestream today, which can be found on YouTube. I can see how the Bullet Journal system has evolved over the twelve years it has been in existence, and it is so very much more than what I’ve seen online: pasting down cute stickers, and highlighting headers with Mildliners, and calling it “journaling.”