Review: The Age of Orphans, by Laleh Khadivi

Laleh Khadivi won the Whiting Writer's award for this, her first work, in 2008. That, combined with the published description of the work, placed The Age of Orphans at the top of my library request list. As it turns out, 'Orphans' is nothing at all like what that summary leads the reader to believe. What I thought was going to be a straightforward coming-of-age tale of a Kurdish boy orphaned in a war turned out instead to be the beginning of an epic story the likes of which I haven't read or seen since The Last Emperor.

As the novel begins, Reza is a ten year-old child in the Zagros Mountains, an area swathed in war between newly-founded Iran and the Kurds who have always called the land their own. Following the circumscision ceremony that bridges Reza's allotted time in childhood to that of adult life, village men hear of Iranian soliders approaching, and leave the village en masse, bringing the boy-man Reza with them. After their inevitable horrific defeat, Reza is captured and brainwashed by the Iranian soldiers, confused to the point that he betrays his own countrymen and quickly rises to leadership in the Iranian army, aquiring fame, power, and a horridly beautiful wife who mocks his heritage until Reza reaches, and then passes, his breaking point, surrounded by both sides of his countrymen.

The crux of this novel, what makes it so beautifully crafted, is that Reza is not orphaned only once, but many times, in ways that an average person might not have consider in her daily life. Khadivi reveals this to us slowly, through descriptions of Reza's emotions and experiences, rather than using a lesser novelist's path of simply spelling it out to the reader. When Reza is literally ripped from his mother's breasts, he is orphaned of his mother, for upon entering the men's sphere, he has to leave her behind forever, although he is certainly not ready. The death of his father orphans him a second, more literal time, while the loss of his identity as a Kurd, a third. This may be the most crushing blow of all, for while he is no longer allowed to think as a Kurd, he is also never fully accepted as Iranian; this is the event that truly sets Reza on his path to destruction. He is doomed to forever be a child-man who has grown only into a man-child, always searching for love, comfort, and a country he can belong to, fighting his self-loathing and yearning for something he cannot understand or admit.

While the sadness of Reza's story is unfolding, Khadivi surrounds it with prose that brings the Kurdish mountains to the forefront of the mind's eye. Passages like

'a dead body floats down the street, wrapped in a white gauze, the faces of the pallbearers as somber as moneylenders who deal in daemons'

fill the imagination with visions of the culture and expansive suppression of Tehran. Her words bring the streets as well as Reza's inner turmoil to life in a way that stings like sand blowing in a wind storm. The swirling thoughts and feelings leave the reader not knowing whether to root for, or against, Reza's final acceptance of one culture over the other, and which of his selves he should abandon.

Because the novel wasn't what I expected at first, it took me a short time to become engaged, particularly because of the brutality of the Kurdish village life. However, once the fighting was over, and Reza's fate became clearer, I couldn't put it down. Reza's final decision of where his life will go, and his destruction of the one person who has come to embody all that has been wrong with his life, brings a surprising calmness and sudden clarity to the internal chaos he had increasingly experienced.

'Orphans' is supposed to be the first in a trilogy; I assume the next installment will follow Reza's children, who have scattered to the winds by the end of the novel. Whenever they appear, I will be in line to read them.

Rating: five stars. Brutally honest and deeply saddening story of a man lost to family, country and self.