Mahbod seraji biography of george
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Rooftops of Tehran by Mahbod Seraji
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Rooftops of Tehran () by Mahbod Seraji (his first book) is a fictitious account of Pasha Shahed, a year-old boy spending his summer in Tehran, Iran with his best friends in The novel is loosely based on Seraji&#;s own time spent in Iran before he left at the age of 19, roughly the same age as Pasha who moves to America to attend university after faking his high school grades.
Actually, Seraji states in a conversation found at the back of the book that when he was writing the book the protagonist (or Pasha) had no name since he/Seraji thought in terms of himself as being the main character, and Pasha &#;would have been [Seraji&#;s] name if Mahbod wasn&#;t chosen, and Shahed is [Seraji&#;s] father&#;s pseudonym, and [Seraj&#;s] mother&#;s maiden name.&#;
The reader can rest assured that Seraji is not only writing from memory but also from the heart.
Rooftops of Tehran is basically a love story that goes horribly
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I see this book as a hybrid between a (late) coming-of-age YA book and a &#;chick lit&#; book (albeit with a male protagonist). But this guy-loves-girl – maybe-loses-girl – maybe-gets-girl story is not about the plot per se. So we could also call this a “meta” book. In sum, we have a metachicklit-YA book. I’ll let the author’s own words serve in explanation.
In an interview printed at the conclusion of the book, Seraji says that he wanted to klar up misconceptions about Iranians. Because Iran has been characterized as a terrorist nation,
&#;We’re encouraged to forget that our so-called enemies have feelings and are capable of love and friendship. We see them as so dissimilar, we can’t imagine that we may actually have a lot in common.”
And so he has constructed a story about “friendship and humor, love and hope, universal experiences valued bygd people in all times and places.”
Pasha and Ahmed, year-old best friends, meet almost nightly on the rooftop (where the air is cool
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From the Novel Readings archives: A very interesting conversation this morning with an Iranian student taking my current summer course had me thinking again about Mahbod Seraji&#;s Rooftops of Tehran, which I reviewed last year. My student, who plans on becoming a journalist, is passionately interested in telling stories about the experience of living in Iran today, especially for women and children. I was fascinated to hear her account of having read Jane Eyre years ago in a Farsi version which she now realizes was heavily censored or revised&#;so that, for instance, Jane is a much less rebellious character. She brought out a number of ways in which our 19th-century readings (so far we&#;ve worked on Pride and Prejudice, Scott&#;s &#;The Two Drovers,&#; and Jane Eyre) resonate for her with very contemporary situations in Iran&#;in much the way that Azar Nafisi&#;s Reading Lolita in Tehran (a book she admires) suggests as well. One of the things we also discussed was how