Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14, 2020

Man of My Time is told from the agonized perspective of a man who regrets being the person he allowed himself to become. As countless people who serve brutal leaders have done, the narrator considers whether survival is worth the cost of living in disgrace. He comes to understand that survivors avoid disgrace by growing into a personal mythology. The distance between mythology and reality, though, is the distance that the mythical figure must place between himself and everyone he has ever cared about.

When Sadegh Mozaffarain is cremated, his son Hamid visits New York, meets his brother, and returns to Iran bearing part of his father’s ashes. Most of Man of My Time is told in memory as Hamid recalls the life that alienated him from his father and later from his wife and child. Sadegh was a professor at Tehran University and an official in the Ministry of Culture who spent a lifetime constructing an encyclopedia. Sadegh explains to Hamid that he was against the system until he became the system — a dynamic that will replicate in Hamid’s life.

As a young man, Hamid performs an evil act that symbolically (and in a sense actually) destroys his father. Having demonstrated his capacity to betray his own family, Hamid is offered a job as a prison interrogator. Hamid claims he meant well when he took the job, although the alternative would have been to submit to an interrogation about the graffiti that he scrawls in Tehran, signed “Man of Revolt.” While he enjoyed playing the role of revolutionary gadfly, Hamid was less committed to an ideological cause than he was to impressing a student he hoped to seduce.

Hamid feels “a pang of loss” for his revolutionary days but grows into his role as an interrogator all too comfortably. Hamid, who once used art as a means of expressing support for revolution, becomes a religious censor and judges the fate of artists and others who stray from a righteous and permissible path. The job leads him on a journey that darkens his soul.

While Hamid’s parents and brother escape the revolution by moving to the United States, Hamid stays in Iran. “Freedom with no lifeblood has no meaning for me,” he tells his brother.

Hamid meets Noushin when he interrogates her about a foreign film found on her VCR. They marry and have a daughter named Golnaz. Their lives seem happy until Hamid is overtaken by the ideology of his masters. He becomes seduced by the Ayatollah’s promise to end oppression by submitting to the rule of God over human affairs. Noushin comes to regard him not as a husband but as a “warden with a wedding ring.” She leaves him five years before Golnaz leaves. Hamid’s insistence on enforcing a strict moral code on Golnaz, and to use force to accomplish that end, extinguishes his relationship with his daughter.

Hamid eventually betrays friends just as he betrayed his father and just as his father betrayed friends. Despite an inevitable epiphany that causes him to regret the choices he has made, Hamid is not so foolish as to believe the choices can be undone. He can move forward, try to atone, attempt to reconnect with Golnaz, but the novel makes clear that nothing can undo the past. He will forever occupy "a skipped generation, a hiccup in history." His father lived in a time of relative intellectual freedom while his daughter's generation doesn't "want to hear about your revolution any more. We want good friends, devoted lovers, nights of music, days of discourse and ideas. It's life we want, and love . . . ."

Dalia Sofer does not try to make the reader sympathize with Hamid. Rather, she provides insight into how the life of a man like Hamid might develop and how he might deal with his grief when he realizes he has constructed a life based on self-deceit. Sofer’s prose is an exceptional blend of elegance and power. The book is quotable and timely. It is a book that will always be timely unless the world finally rids itself of oppressors who impose their religious edicts on those who are do not have the kind of power or freedom that allows them to live as they please.

RECOMMENDED

The opening lines of this fascinating novel are like being asked to choose door number 1, 2, or 3 . . . which one beckons loudest? Can you relate to not talking to a parent for 38 years but being the recipient of his ashes? Check. How about being (or knowing) an immigrant confined to constraints laid in place by the government? Check (for anyone who talks to people). Do you understand how hard it is for the followers of a faith to follow religious rules in a secular society? Check! How do we (or will we) handle the ashes of our parents' lives? This fascinating novel had a lot of substance that kept me reading and thinking and often nodding in enthusiastic--and sometimes sad--recognition.

A complex study of a former Iranian Revolutionary and interrogator and his interactions with loyalty and love. With many literary and artistic references, the man is created with all of his foibles. His father, his brother, an anonymous artist, his wife and his daughter to name a few are all but failed efforts at love and peace . Only by hurting others does he seemingly become complete. An unlikable main character and a rough start but stick with it to relive Iranian politics from the past as well as today.


Copy provided by the Publisher and NetGalley

A character driven novel with multiple complex relationships, Man of My Time is a reflection of the conflicted decisions and paths in life individuals are forced to make during political upheavals that will forever impact their lives. Hamid Mozaffarian is one such individual, the older of two sons of a father working for the Iranian government during the time of then Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. In 1953, a U.S.-backed coup resulted in the ousting of the prime minister leading to years of instability and uncertainty, culminating with the 1979 revolution. As in any sustained political unrest - autocracy raises its ugly head. These are the formative years for Hamid - as a young boy, teenager, and young adult, he’s idealistic, naive, and craves the love and affection of his father. But idealism and disillusionment soon collide leading to an internal maelstrom, a conflicted young revolutionary, and a pivotal decision that will lead to an irrevocable estrangement from his family. While his parents and brother elect to immigrant, Hamid much against his father’s wishes, elects to remain in Iran, convinced that all will be well. The storyline takes place in the present - with Hamid on a government trip New York City, where he meets his mother and brother after decades. His father is dead, and his mother has asked him to fulfill his father’s wish - for his ashes to be taken back to his beloved Iran. However, most of the storyline unfolds in retrospect. We go back in time with Hamid as he traces the trajectory of his life, his childhood friends, his family, his decisions, meeting his wife, the birth of their daughter, their stormy relationship, and up to the present day. We move back and forth in time to understand who Hamid is today and where his future lies. Like the author’s first book, The Septembers of Shiraz, this is a finely crafted novel, layered, and multi-dimensional. I enjoyed the book and would definitely recommend it. It’s one that needs time to absorb, to understand before we judge, and to appreciate the power of storytelling. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

‘How does the stone stand being a stone?’ The question is asked and hauntingly answered in Sofer’s darkly gripping new novel which enters the being of a social pariah, an all-too-self-aware interrogator in Iran’s revolutionary government, a man whose intelligence is no shield against the compromises of his place and time.

Child of ‘a neglectful father, a selfish mother, a drunken uncle’, Hamid Mozaffarian grows up a privileged child in the era of the Shah. His father’s intellectualism is indulged, as is a taste for Western culture and style. Yet the family is chilly, Hamid’s father sceptical and derisive towards the boy, when not absorbed in his Sisyphean task of researching and compiling an art encyclopedia. Hamid has artistic abilities, but these bring him little paternal credit, setting up a pattern of domestic withdrawal and alienation that will deepen and widen over the years, distancing Hamid later from his own wife and child.

Attracted to revolutionary politics, later to a Jewish girl, given to expressing his isolation through long explorations of the country by motorbike, Hamid grows into a detached young adult, his attitude clouded by the knowledge of his father’s earlier political betrayals, which the son will eventually match and outbid. When the country finally tips over into social upheaval, Hamid acts, delivering his father’s destruction in a seismic breach of faith.

Sofer largely brackets this past in lengthy flashbacks from a ‘present’ in which Hamid, now a middle-aged man, is visiting New York City, member of a diplomatic mission to the UN. But the city is also home to his émigré family, at least his mother and brother. His father has died a short while earlier.

The gift of Hamid’s father’s ashes in a peppermint tin, which the son must carry around in his pocket – Hamid has been tasked with taking them back to Iran for burial – is but one of the bitter notes of humour and lingering symbols to be found in this melancholy but fully-fleshed portrait of inescapable taint. Hamid’s account of becoming the man he is offers no exculpation. Instead his ashy vision wraps all the characters in a cloak of greater or lesser complicity, misfortune and corruption.

Deserted by his wife and daughter, partly at his own encouragement, Hamid is a living breathing ghost or even ghoul, as is glimpsed by his erudite father in a late dream, a vision of a sculpture scarred, blinded and encrusted. It’s to Sofer’s considerable credit that she nevertheless renders Hamid’s voice and his narration so compelling. Perhaps the political box in which he finds himself is locked a little too neatly, perhaps his tone becomes too oppressive in the novel’s later pages, perhaps the novel’s middle section overstates. Nevertheless this is an ambitious, elegant story of metamorphosis, of a slow descent to ‘a constellation of heartbreak…for the betrayal, the love, the destruction.’

Restrained, precise, ineluctable, this is a fable for our anguished era.

Also titled: The Beginning of My Downfall.

I love a book set in a different time and culture; one can learn so much.

Set mostly in Iran, but partially in New York City, "...this book tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who is as alienated from himself as he is from the world around him. After decades of ambivalent work as an interrogator with the Iranian regime, Hamid travels on a diplomatic mission to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father, whose dying wish was to be buried in Iran".

A solid 4.

I was into the book from the start and my interest only waned a bit at the end.

This book is beautifully written. I noted many instances of phrases that were fabulously descriptive:

"As we ate in silence, I felt once more the familiar weight of time, its incapacity to contain the past."

a shower--"...the vanishing steam, which seemed, just then, like human breath."

"...conducted a triage of his belongings, condensing his life into one suitcase."

and many more.

A man in confict with himself [and his family--parents and sibling, wife and child].

A bureaucrat following his path--or can he alter it? Does he have an excuse? A way out? Does he want one?

An interrogator trying to figure out where he belongs --is his path right or wrong? What is his place in the system and how does it conflict [or not] with his family, memories, past, future].

Set in Iran before the Shah and through the ayatollah, the book covers a lot of territory.

Recommend.