جبروت الفارسية 1448

The word Jabarut evokes the multilayered cosmology of the Islamic philosophical and mystical tradition: a realm beyond the material world and even beyond the world of Malakut. True to the philosophical heritage of the term, Jabarut is a genuinely multilayered and polyphonic novel.

The novel opens before its readers a fictional universe so richly layered and so densely woven with references to diverse texts and intellectual traditions that reading it can feel like deciphering a Joycean novel written in Persian. References ranging from the second law of thermodynamics and power relations in modern capitalism to celebrated works of painting are brought together in astonishing ways, all pointing toward death and what lies beyond it.

At the same time, within the context of modern Persian literature, Jabarut inevitably recalls Malakut, the masterpiece of Bahram Sadeghi. Indeed, in its entirety and on nearly every page, Jabarut engages in a profound, evolving, and inexhaustible dialogue with Malakut, with Sadeghi’s other works, and with The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat.

Jabarut may be an extension of the fragmented and bewildered world inhabited by the characters of Malakut, or perhaps a world raised above it. Whatever it may be, the novel introduces to Persian fiction a new literary universe: philosophical, astonishing, and deeply original.