Long ago, in distant Iran, a poor village girl with a gift for
carpet-knotting suffered many setbacks on her journey to womanhood
and self-fulfillment.Stories-within-the-story and richly colored
glimpses of Isfahan society, both high and low, as well as much
detail on the business of designing and creating carpets, swell the
pages of Amirrezvani's novel, a devoted tale of ill fate as
portended by a passing comet. The nameless teenage heroine, a
favored only child in a tiny community, suddenly loses her father
and then her dowry, forcing her to relocate, along with her mother,
to the city, to live under the protection of a relative, Gostaham,
who works as a master in the Shah's carpet-making workshop and
permits his niece to watch and learn while he works, even though,
as a female, she will never be able to take up a job alongside men.
She catches the eye of Fereydoon, a wealthy horse-trader's son, but
being too lowly to become his formal wife, is forced instead to
accept a sigheh - a secret, three-month, renewable contract with
him. Fereydoon is an indifferent lover until she learns to please
him, but then the situation darkens when he takes for his proper
wife her closest friend. The headstrong heroine, devoid of love,
friendship and true security, decides to end the sigheh, but her
rashness results in her and her mother's expulsion onto the
streets. Hunger, illness and beggary follow, but the girl learns
wisdom and responsibility, regains Gostaham's favor, becomes
carpet-maker (with her own all-female workshop) to the Shah's harem
and looks forward to finding another husband of her own choosing.A
lavishly detailed debut, in which some of the simple values of a
folktale are woven together with richer (and more modern)
women-centered life lessons. (Kirkus Reviews)
Set in seventeenth-century Iran, THE BLOOD OF FLOWERS is the
powerful and haunting story of a young girl's journey from
innocence to adulthood. The novel begins in the 1620s in a remote
village where the narrator (whose name, in the Iranian storytelling
tradition, we are never to know) lives with her mother and
rug-maker father. On the sudden death of her father our heroine and
her mother fall upon hard times and are forced to travel to the
bustling, beautiful, exotic city of Isfahan where relatives take
them in. Everything is new: the grudging charity of her aunt, the
encouragement of her uncle, one of the finest carpet-makers in the
world, who begins to teach her his craft, the treacherous
friendship of the daughter of rich neighbours. And there's an
adventure ahead which will introduce her to the sensual side of
life as well as to the cruelty of betrayal and rejection before she
finds her way to contentment and possibly, even, to happiness, in a
world full of contrasts and dangers.
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