Parisa Reza’s first novel, The Gardens of Consolation, opens in the year 1299 of the Iranian calendar. Talla is just twelve, but she is already married to Sardar, an illiterate teenage shepherd who has returned to the village of Ghamsar to claim his bride. Soon after they leave Ghamsar – “the gates of hell and the source of paradise” – Talla is startled by a “monster . . . a black headless hulk with bulging eyes set into its body . . . its mouth exhaling a horrifying scream”. It turns out to be a Renault, whose occupants roar with laughter at the sight of Talla leaping from her donkey in fear. This scene is narrated in the present tense (only later do we learn that the novel is set in the 1920s), and in simple, almost childlike language. It prefigures the dissonance that underpins Reza’s novel: at once a tale of a rural couple grappling with the modernization of Iran, their son Bahram and his engagement with politics, twentieth-century Iran and the role and status of women in a deeply patriarchal society.
Each of Reza’s chapters bears a woman’s name; before long we understand why Ghamsar, for example, the source of prized rose water, bears its dual identity. At the age of four Talla’s sister, Havva, has yet to grow out of wetting the bed. Furious, her father holds a glowing log to her genitalia; she dies of her wounds. This, though, is an act from “the innocence of hell”; it is borne of mores, not malice, from time immemorial.
Talla’s first two children – a daughter, Ghohar, and a son who is not named – died before Bahram came along. Academically and physically gifted, Bahram goes to Tehran University and fervently supports the reformer Mohammad Mossadegh. Tumult ensues, not just politically but in Bahram’s relations with women. With Mahine, he discovers “something that many men on this earth never know: a woman’s pleasure”, but he cannot cope with Firouzeh’s unexpected sexual boldness. He spurns other women if they merely dance with other men, and loses Elaheh, the one woman who truly loves him. Throughout everything, Talla (“fatally untamed”) and Sardar are as unchanging as the mulberry tree in their garden. The Gardens of Consolation celebrates their enduring love and deftly questions the fate of women, wearing the chador or otherwise, in the modern world.
