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| Donne' Raffat |
Fiction/Novel |
| Folly of Speaking |
| The Seventh Tale |
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Published by Blind Owl Press, imprint of Mazda Publishers
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Abbas Sepehri, an aspiring cabinet minister under the Shah, is mysteriously fired and plunges into a world of political intrigue. His public disgrace then launches him on a personal journey that takes him to America, where his crisis deepens.
There Abbas falls in love with the beautiful Ellen Hauser, wife of his longtime friend and employer, Lynn, director of a Middle East Center with close ties to the State Department. Next, his public lecture series is disrupted by dissident Iranian students, leading further to humiliation and exposure to a side of himself that he avoided facing in his own country.
This dark comedy of manners explores the ties and conflicts between two former allied nations at a critical turning point in their relationship. It also brings Abbas, a product of both worlds, up against the folly of trying to mediate between two opposing ways of political thinking, when the attempt to do so merely widens the rift.
Donné Raffat weaves a rich and revealing cross-cultural story around the people caught up in the web of events culminating in the Iranian Revolution. The Folly of Speaking is the third in his quartet of connected works set against the rising turbulence in Iranian life in the twentieth century.
Donné Raffat, author of The Caspian Circle and The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi, lives in La Jolla, California, and teaches English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.
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“Few people write so clearly about the Iranian intellectual and—occasionally—ruling class as Donné Raffat. His second novel, The Folly of Speaking, centers about a fascinating protagonist, Abbas Sepehri, the ups and downs of whose life bring him in the novel to the United States where he comes within a hair’s breadth of becoming an Iranian American. Raffat’s depiction of Sepehri’s emotional roller coaster has all the interest of a romantic novel, but it is enhanced by being set in the fiery politics of the last decades. It is the sort of book which enables one to say, ‘So this is how such a man felt and thought. This is the real thing!’ Donné Raffat, a master of two worlds, helps the reader to a share of his mastery.”
—RICHARD STERN
“One turns from any new novel by Donné Raffat with a sense both humbling and exhilarating that the world is larger than one knew. In The Folly of Speaking, he is both novelist and international tour guide, and never better in either role.”
—JACK MILES |
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 | Donne' Raffat
Donné Raffat, author of "The Caspian Circle" and "The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavai" teaches English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. |
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