![]() ![]() ![]() He sees in his macabre, feverish nightmares that "the presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary". The novel tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, who, while in despair after losing a mysterious lover, addresses his morbid confessions to a shadow on his wall that looks like an owl. ![]() ![]() It was later banned, reportedly because it led readers towards suicide. It was originally published in a limited edition in Bombay, during Hedayat's two-year-long stay there in 1937, and stamped with "Not for sale or publication in Iran." The novel was not tolerated during Reza Shah's rule, probably due to its "pessimism which went counter to the Shah’s grandiloquent rhetoric of progress." After Reza Shah's abdication, it was serialised in the daily Iran, and had an immediate and forceful effect. Hedayat was inspired by European literature and ideas, and challenged many traditional Iran conventions in the novel, a quality that has often marked him as the father of modernist Persian literature. It is believed that much of the novel had already been completed by 1930 while Hedayat was still a student in Paris. The Blind Owl was written during the latter years of the rule of Reza Shah. ![]()
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