Review: Only Sound Remains by Hossein Asgari

A father makes an unexpected visit to his son in this intriguing, melancholic novel. Arriving rather out of the blue from Iran, Ismael has a story to tell, one that will challenge the fragile peace Saeed has found in Adelaide, where he moved five years ago after publishing a political novel about the disappearance of his best friend. Saeed spies an unusual book under the mattress of his bed which he’s given up to his father for his stay, the son relegated to the couch. The book is by Forugh Forrokhzad, “the poet of worldly love”. Writing explicitly about sex and desire under her own name, Forrokhzad scandalised Iranian society at a time when it was possible a woman having an affair might be killed without consequence. One of the poems in the collection is dedicated to IG, coincidentally the initials of Saeed’s father. So begins his story, unfolding interrupted like the Persian roots of the 1,0001 nights, as he and Saeed move through the esplanades, cafes and parks of Adelaide.

Ismael encountered Forrokhzad as a young teenager in the Tehran neighbourhood where he was raised, at a formative time for a boy and a nation. Forrokhzad arouses something dangerous in him: desire, but also its companion, jealousy. He wants to possess her, but her lusty poetry is there for all the men of Tehran to read. Around the same time he falls under the influence of his imam the Ayatollah Entezari, who courts him with promises that he is “part of something large than life or death”, and that “our actions, wills, even our most private thoughts and desires could interact with the material world.” Just as Ismael is roiled by internal conflict, so is Iran; he’s in a bookshop furtively buying Forrokhzad’s latest collection (which he purchases nine times, tearing up each one, so destroying that which he loves) when the 1953 coup occurs, reinstating the monarchy after the US and the UK got worried the elected prime minister might nationalise the oil fields.

Only Sound Remains toys with this conflict between the spirit and the body, polity and subject, and the tension carries Ismael’s story as he gets older and his involvement with Forrokhzad and his faith deepens and darkens. “If death is the end,” Ismail poses:

If you believe that death is the end, then it seems that you can reason for or against anything and everything. A reasoning purely informed by flesh: every mark, every line, every cell, every function, every disfunction, every memory of an interaction with the outside world … A proposition too arbitrary, too chaotic!

But as Ismael’s story progresses, and the Iranian Revolution looms, these contradictions begin to tangle and blur. Ismael watches from the sidelines the political fervour of the era, as Marxists deck it out with Ayatollahs over their dream for an Islamic Republic, a vision of liberation but, with the power of hindsight, also one of tyranny. He also finds ways, dubious and devious, of keeping Forrokhzad in sight and his desire alive, which increasingly rules him. The passion Forrokhzad expresses in her poetry, that Ismael feels for Forrokhzad, that the Ayatollahs feel for country and God — they all begin to seem to well from the same source. Each clambers for sovereignty over flesh, spirit, nation but Ismael’s lesson that he seems to want to convey to Saeed may be that such a search is fruitless, that the yearning for self-determination can only be borne, not resolved. Saeed’s flight from Iran to safety may not be the straightforward freedom it seems.

Asgari’s prose is taut and inornate and his narrative a triumph of form. As Ismael tells his story, interrupted by Saeed’s wanderings around quaint Adelaide past and present blur just as the contradictions between the religious leaders and Forrokhzad do. Adelaide and Tehran begin to shimmer into each other. When Ismael and Saeed go for a drink:

Outside the cafe, a boy in black swimming trunks took a group of teenagers by surprise squirting water on them with his water gun. The group dispersed, shouting and laughing, trying to return the attack. Some water splashed onto the glass wall next to our table. “Sorry!” A teenage girl smiled and dashed to the other side of the street.

It seems a playful scene, but the intrusion of the “gun” and “attack”, the water “splashed” onto the table, the hint of masculine violence, suggest a more fervid setting. Asgari’s attention to the city spaces of Adelaide and Tehran create an urban architecture where a turn down an alley might take you to another place and another time.

Gay rating: not gay.