Then the Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian
Then the Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian
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Then the Fish Swallowed Him
A Novel

Author: Amir Ahmadi Arian

Narrator: Fajer Al-Kaisi

Unabridged: 7 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 03/24/2020


Synopsis

An critically-acclaimed Iranian author makes his American literary debut with this powerful and harrowing psychological portrait of modern Iran—an unprecedented and urgent work of fiction with echoes of The Stranger, 1984, and The Orphan Master’s Son—that exposes the oppressive and corrosive power of the state to bend individual lives. Yunus Turabi, a bus driver in Tehran, leads an unremarkable life. A solitary man since the unexpected deaths of his father and mother years ago, he is decidedly apolitical—even during the driver’s strike and its bloody end. But everyone has their breaking point, and Yunus has reached his.Handcuffed and blindfolded, he is taken to the infamous Evin prison for political dissidents. Inside this stark, strangely ordered world, his fate becomes entwined with Hajj Saeed, his personal interrogator. The two develop a disturbing yet interdependent relationship, with each playing his assigned role in a high stakes psychological game of cat and mouse, where Yunus endures a mind-bending cycle of solitary confinement and interrogation. In their startlingly intimate exchanges, Yunus’s life begins to unfold—from his childhood memories growing up in a freer Iran to his heartbreaking betrayal of his only friend. As Yunus struggles to hold on to his sanity and evade Saeed’s increasingly undeniable accusations, he must eventually make an impossible choice: continue fighting or submit to the system of lies upholding Iran’s power.Gripping, startling, and masterfully told, Then the Fish Swallowed Him is a haunting story of life under despotism.

About Amir Ahmadi Arian

Amir Ahmadi Arian started out as a journalist in Iran in 2000 and has since published a collection of stories, a nonfiction book, and two novels in Persian. He also translated from English to Persian novels by E.L Doctorow, Paul Auster, P.D. James, and Cormac McCarthy. Since leaving Iran in 2011 to complete a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Queensland, Australia, he has published short stories and essays in Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He currently lives in New York where he earned an MFA in the NYU Creative Writing Program as The Axinn Foundation/E.L. Doctorow Fellowship recipient, and teaches literature and creative writing at CUNY City College.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on July 18, 2020

This novel has a lot of ambition but sometimes we see the ambition more than the story. Gorgeous language. Interesting structure. But the protagonist is underdeveloped and his interrogator Hajj Saeed is like a composite of a dastardly interrogators from movies about prison and torture. The ending is......more

Goodreads review by Paige on March 23, 2020

Yunus is a fourty-four year old bus driver in Tehran. Gathered at a bus drivers strike, things quickly intensify and chaos ensues. Violence breaks out and one thing leads to another. Yunus is arrested and sent to Evin Prison where he fights to hold onto the truth. The corruption of the justice syste......more

Goodreads review by نیکزاد on July 04, 2021

پس از اینکه یونس مفصل کتک خورده و دو روز نیمه‌بیهوش بوده، بالاخره بیدار می‌شود. زندان‌بان برایش عدس‌پلو می‌آورد. می‌خورد و همزمان با فرو دادن لقمه‌ها، قوای روحی به او برمی‌گردد و ذهنش از محدودیت‌های زندان عبور می‌کند. سلول بنظرش «وسیع» می‌رسد و همین برایش مولد نوعی آزادی‌ست. کاسه توالت. لازم نیست که......more

Goodreads review by Darryl on April 15, 2020

This was an engrossing read. A thorough examination of solitude, captivity, coercion, corruption, torture, violence, loyalty, manipulation, and politics gets worked into the narrative of post-revolutionary Iran. There's even a fascinating section exploring the effects of Stockholm Syndrome. The last......more