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The Folly of Speaking
The Seventh Tale
Donné Raffat
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 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.
"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
Specifications:
2000: x+228pp.
ISBN:1-56859-101-2(paper): $15.95
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Arrest of Hoveyda
Avicenna and I
Folly of Speaking
In a Voice of Their Own
Kanizu
Marsh
Sargozasht Haji Baba-ye Isfahani
Tup-e Morvari
Winter Sleep
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