The blind owl - Sadegh Hedayat

Sadegh Hedayat's most famous work is a deeply haunting and disturbing gem of world literature, a classic tale that defies any attempt to tie it down to a single interpretation.The story is narrated by a young man, a painter of miniatures, whose name we never learn. He feels an overbearing need to recount an experience he went through that has shattered his whole existence, rendered his life meaningless - "I am obliged to set all this down in order to disentangle the various threads of my story. I am obliged to explain it all for the benefit of my shadow on the wall."We are slowly drawn into the hallucinatory and confused world of the young man, a world in which a beautiful young woman, an old man and a cypress tree become the recurring motifs. Not only are they the images he always paints but he sees all three in a vision that comes to plague him. This waking dream ends up becoming a nightmare from which the narrator seems unable to escape...Set in a haze of opium, The Blind Owl must rank as one of the most mysterious, poetic and macabre works of twentieth century fiction. It is a book of enormous power and this well-overdue reissue sees the return to print of one of the greatest Persian novels ever written.