Review by Brian H. Appleton, [...] of:
The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
The story is like an opium dream in which the reader drifts along with the writer in and out of awake and dreaming with recurring themes and symbols like an intoxicated mind trying to keep hold of its tenuous grasp on reality. There is the blue morning glory flower, the flower-vase of Rhages, kisses with the bitter taste of the green stub end of the cucumber, the smell of champac perfume, the wine bottle with the cobra venom that he can't get rid of like a boomerang, the singing drunken policemen passing by the street below, the bone handled butcher knife that he can't get rid of like a boomerang, the butcher cutting up sheep carcasses, the coughing horses with dead sheep slung over their backs, these images keep recurring in different circumstances like a floating mirage. His imagery is at times stunningly beautiful like his simple description of a row of dark shadowy trees along a road in the night which look like they are all holding hands so as not to fall down on a slippery slope. The rows of strange and menacing looking houses of geometric shapes like cones and prisms that recur as in a dream sequence; if it were made into a film it would be reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal."
The hearse driver and the odds and ends man with his head scarf and hideous laughter "of a quality that make the hairs on one's body stand on end," and the narrator himself seem to at times be different people and at other times they are one and the same. In the end we don't know if the wife has committed adultery or not with one or with many or only with the old odds and ends man or if in fact that was really the narrator and that this is all his imagined paranoia. We sense that his frustration, love and hate for his wife is powerfully real and all consuming regardless of the state of her fidelity and in fact he claims that her neglect is what is causing his slow death.
The painting on the top of the pen case is of the dark mysterious woman with staring eyes on the other side of a stream holding a blue morning glory flower while the old man with the scarf wrapped around his head and neck squats on the other side laughing hideously. Where the story started to remind me of Edgar Allen Poe is the first time the theme of the drunken policemen singing as they pass by his window in the street makes him think they are coming to get him so we are given a hint that he has either already committed murder or will, even though the strange silent woman on the pen case has mysteriously appeared sitting on his doorsteps and when he lets her into his house, she goes straight to his bed and lays down and dies. We begin to understand that she and his wife are one and the same person but events which chronologically should precede others seem out of order like the way hallucinations induced by drugs seem to interrupt the brain waves like jumbling the letters of the alphabet out of order even if they are still all there. We have no idea in the end if the story took place over a matter of days or months or all in one night like the hauntings by the various ghosts of Christmas of Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."
The descriptions of his own thoughts and feelings and his changing body appearance and shadow and facial expressions, his fevers and depressions and the pleasure and power he takes from fear, pain and self torment, is like an ever changing kaleidoscope of one completely living within one's own mind and only marginally in touch with the outside world like the autistic. It is like a river passing along in which the same objects bob underwater only to resurface again and again further up or down the stream like his and his wife's lost childhood playing hide-and-seek along the Suran.
His descriptions of dried coagulated blood and decay and murder, dispassionately like a mortician performing autopsy without emotion or like it is not really happening but only imagined so that the reader is never actually sure, keeps us riveted from the beginning of the tale to the end.
Again it is reminiscent of Poe's poem "The Beautiful Annabel Lee" and his seemingly unorthodox marriage to his 13 year old cousin and her early demise in real life. The suspense rises and falls palpably like a recurring tide and makes one feel with the author, like a rat stuck on the tread mill of life, coming round full circle again and again but never really going anywhere with only the illusion of linear progress. The story ends as abruptly as it begins, yet resolves with everything falling neatly into place like the toys that come to life when no one is looking, which then freeze the moment a person enters the room. The ease with which the author has populated this dreamscape of existential nausea makes me think it was a struggle with which he was intimately familiar himself and his suicide becomes all the more poignant.
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