Short takes

July 19, 2009|Barbara Fisher, Globe Correspondent

CENSORING AN IRANIAN LOVE STORY
By Shahriar Mandanipour
Translated, from the Farsi, by Sara Khalili
Knopf, 304 pp., $25

“Censorship drives a poet or a writer to abstain from superficiality and to instead delve into the layers and depths of love and relationships and achieve a level of creativity that Western poets and writers cannot even dream of.’’ As the writer here tries to tell his love story, he is mindful that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, in the person of a Mr. Petrovich, has complete editorial control. Thus he alters his text, omitting what he knows is unacceptable or crossing out the passages that will be deemed provocative or injurious to public chastity. The crossed out passages are included, with black lines, the omissions re-marked.

He creates his young lovers Sara and Dara, allows them to speak in public and attempt to meet in private. He imagines Mr. Petrovich, his most attentive and responsive audience. Author and characters must write, speak, and act with subtlety and subterfuge in life and on the page. But the characters have lives and minds of their own, acting in ways the writer does not support, objecting to words they would not have spoken. In this brilliantly conceived and cleverly written novel, characters and author together and separately act and write with sly purpose, disguising and disavowing their subversive ends - to live, love, and create in today’s repressive Iranian society.

BENNY & SHRIMP
By Katarina Mazetti
Translated, from the Swedish, by Sarah Death
Penguin, 224 pp., $14

In this surprising little love story (originally written in Swedish), two lonely 30-somethings, Benny and Shrimp meet in a cemetery, tending to graves. In alternating chapters, they tell their overlapping stories. He runs a farm with 24 cows, working around the clock. She is a librarian, in charge of the children’s section. Their first impressions of each other are poor - he considers her beige and dull, sitting by her bare, unplanted grave; she reduces him to his peaked cap, his soiled hands, and the monstrously tasteless gravestone he cares for.