The Blind Owl (1937)

The Blind Owl (1937)
Sadegh Hedayat
Iran
Novel

The Blind Owl is written by modern Persian literate Sadegh Hedayat in 1937 during the dictatorial reign of Reza Shah in Iran. But the first edition of book was published in Bombay stamped with "Not for sale or publication in Iran.". After his rule it was released in Tehran in 1941.
An amazing translation to Malayalam was done by Vilasini.
The protagonist/narrator is living outside city from the hustle and bustle of people's lives surrounded by relics of some old houses. Novel/Novella moves through the thoughts, dreams, memories, sexual desires and oppression, fears also reality of this isolated man (Hedayat didn't give names to characters in this work except Bugam Dasi,). In the first part of The Blind Owl we can see dreamy incidents happening to narrator and they are beautifully blended with the realistic second part.
Using repeated descriptions Hedayat made this fiction a wonderful bizarre piece of art and pushes the readers into a whirlpool of disturbing images. But after analyzing the second part we can see that all the "facts" in the first part is somewhat connected, still Hedayat retains mysteries by leaving some incidents isolated. When we say about 'something repeating' there is an intuition in our mind to set an initial point or from which time it started; thereby rejecting the whole idea of recurrence. In Blind Owl how beautifully he used that technique without giving reader, the initial point. Sometimes we feel that we are succeed in finding that the foremost spot during the advance of reading but it surpasses."My life, on the other hand, my entire life, has had one season and one state." The laughs, Horses, Drawing, scene through hole, geometrically shaped houses, his father and uncle, brother-in-law and his wife etc..
But most of his thoughts are linked with his childhood memories. He inducing those images to his dreams to escape from the "world of fools". The narrator is so disturbed with flow of life, finds death as an ultimate solution from the chaos he facing (death/a state of oblivion).
In the first portion of novella, he is entering a new world/dream by ignoring the previous events in his life. By ignoring, i meant the author induced forgetfulness to him there by adding beauty to the images for readers. The Protagonist is fulfilling his desires in another world unannoyed by time and reality. The mysterious woman comes to his house, fall on his bed, giving her body to him without any resistance. But narrator also loved to kill his wife ( he is calling her a whore) giving her poisonous purple wine. That too he is performing in his dream.(By saying "dream" dont take its as a concrete one, a fluid state)
Only one time he was allowed by his wife to kiss her and the rest of time he was rejected cruelly. And she selected all other males to fuck her. "My feelings of love and hatred for her were mixed." shows his strange emotion to his wife. He is fully rejected from satisfying his sexual desires. During a forceful intercourse he accidentally kills her. I had become the rag-and-bone dealer. To some extent the narrator is similar to the old rag and bone dealer except the fact that the dealer is allowed to sex with her. ("On the whole, this time I did not disapprove of my wife's taste,because the rag-and-bone dealer was not a commonplace, vulgar and colorless man like the stud-males who attract foolish women with an inordinate desire for coition. The layers of misfortune encrusted on the old man's head and face, along with the misery that emanated from him, distinguished him as a demi-god; and even though the old man was not aware of this, he was a manifestation, a representative of creation itself").
We cant find a connection/meaning for all the incidents mentioned in the work and that attempt is boring (which kills the beauty of ambiguity) too. Narrator is always fearing watchmen for some crime he has committed. Since we read the first part,  a confusion may arise  "what crime he committed". There are many instances like this in "The Blind Owl".
The novel gives us a wide ground to think about God, mirror, rooms, walls, rest and rust of ourselves, death (influenced by Rilke, Kafka (from the notes by Bashiri)) above all the thoughts, i loved those grotesque visuals this book gave me.