Bibliograph

My father's notebook, a novel, Kader Abdolah ; translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty

Type

Label

My father's notebook, a novel, Kader Abdolah ; translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

fiction

Main title

My father's notebook

Oclc number

59002565

Responsibility statement

Kader Abdolah ; translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty

Sub title

a novel

Summary

Aga Akbar, the youngest of seven children and the illegitimate son of a Persian nobleman, is a deaf-mute. He makes use of a rudimentary sign language to get by in the world, but his deepest thoughts and feelings go unexpressed. Hoping to free the boy from his emotional confinement, his uncle asks him to visit a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain and to copy a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform inscription -- an order of the first king of Persia and the destination of many pilgrimagesAga Akbar uses these cuneiform characters to fill his notebook with writings only he can understand. Years later, his political-dissident son, Ishmael, has been forced to flee Iran. From his new home in the Netherlands, he attempts to translate the notebook, and in the process he tells his father's story, his own story, and the story of twentieth-century Iran -- from the building of the first railroad to the struggles for power among the shah, the communists, and the mullahs, and ending with the revolution

Contributor