Rating: 
Summary: A gem in lirature
Review: "There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker"
That is how the translation of D.P. Costello starts.
This first line of the book is enough to grab your undivided attention. This opening draws you into a surreal dream world where fiction and fact flow into each other seamlessly, where symbolism and real life events coexist with the shadows of the dreamworld and people of flesh and blood.
If you like, this book can be compared to a fugue, a musical discipline where one theme is repeated and transposed/transformed in the other voices. Likewise, certain themes are repeated in a different context, much like a puzzle. If you are looking for something easy to read, skip this book. BUT, if you are looking for a little gem in literature, which will reveal itself to you only after giving it your undivided attention, much like a beautiful woman waiting to be conquered, then buy this book. You will read it, and read it again and again, and experience a secret joy over discovering something this precious, a precious little gem.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and haunting, truely like no other
Review: An Persian friend reccommended this book to me, and managed to read it all in one sitting. It was such a quick, compelling read, with so much going on that you feel like you are running through a sandstorm. I have NEVER read a description of an insane mind as well written as this. Poe, Lovecraft, and Dostoeyevsky, I would say, have written excellent descriptions of insane minds, but this is by far the best. By the way, Lovecraft and Dostoyevsky are my two favorite authors.
The passage where the narrator describes his dream woman as an angel, and describes the beauty of her eyes is definatly the most beautiful passage I have ever read. Likewise, his descriptions of the more gruesome scenes are really quite disgusting.
Hedayat really wrote a masterpiece here. I would highly reccomend it to people who enjoy the authors I have previously mentioned. Its a great book, with so many layers, and so many different ways to interpret what's going on. In the end, even I was unable to figure out what the truth of the matter really was. Absolutely fascinating.
Rating:
Summary: A psychic novel partII
Review: Blind Owl is a masterpiece whose values are getting more clear as time goes by.This is the whole history of mankind no matter where one was born or raised.There are some similarities which are transcultural and this is the beauty of his work.One is born somewhere in this world with a Paradise in his/her heart.This is somehow reflected in one,s childhood and joyful experiences of youth.These are all symbolized in the dream-lady who is also symbolizing Mother-Persia:the writer,s sweet homeland.Then everything changes and the dream-lady of your sweet dreams becomes your very true wife who makes love to many different people.This is actually your mother-persia who is showing infidelity and surrenders to many diferrent nations and cultures and you have an ambivalent feeling toward her.You love her.How could one stop loving one,s mother? and you hate her.How can one love a disgusting mother who gives her heart to your enemies and to those who tried to eradicate your ancient religion and culture?This is the great tragedy of the writer of "Blind Owl". This ambivalence can not be tolerated in true life and the writer kills his unfaithful wife/mother in his novel and himself in reality.
Rating:
Summary: Dark and beautiful
Review: I can't relate at all to the reviewer who compared reading this book to pulling teeth. It is strange and slightly demented, but these qualities seem only to add to the overall quality. If one were to be in a peculiar state of mind and smoke opium, the result would be something like this. The protagonist is a sick, solitary misanthrope who suffers from what seem to be hallucinations of an old man with a turban with a horrifying laugh (this is repeated over and over again, like some kind of mantra) and a beautiful woman our anti-hero is fixated on. He persistently refers to his wife as "the bitch", but seems to love her dearly despite her infidelity and disdain of him. Hedayat's character is both self loathing and world loathing, preferring to his hypnagogic visions and sickly existence to 'real' life. He no longer makes distinctions between sanity and insanity. He finds a woman's body chopped up (it seems) and does not tell the police. By the end of this novel, really a series of incomprehensible happenings spliced with some bitter comments on humanity, we have come to understand him as a lucid but self divided man losing his mind. This is a must.
Rating:
Summary: Dark and beautiful
Review: I can't relate at all to the reviewer who compared reading this book to pulling teeth. It is strange and slightly demented, but these qualities seem only to add to the overall quality. If one were to be in a peculiar state of mind and smoke opium, the result would be something like this. The protagonist is a sick, solitary misanthrope who suffers from what seem to be hallucinations of an old man with a turban with a horrifying laugh (this is repeated over and over again, like some kind of mantra) and a beautiful woman our anti-hero is fixated on. He persistently refers to his wife as "the bitch", but seems to love her dearly despite her infidelity and disdain of him. Hedayat's character is both self loathing and world loathing, preferring to his hypnagogic visions and sickly existence to 'real' life. He no longer makes distinctions between sanity and insanity. He finds a woman's body chopped up (it seems) and does not tell the police. By the end of this novel, really a series of incomprehensible happenings spliced with some bitter comments on humanity, we have come to understand him as a lucid but self divided man losing his mind. This is a must.
Rating:
Summary: A comment about Mr. Peter Wild's review...
Review: I don't have much to say about the blind owl. This book is one of the most famous books in the world and its value and specific style is awesome. I read the book more than 10 times in persian and english and each time I found it something different, Something more precious than before. I read your comment and all I want to tell you is to express how sorry I am for you being disappointed at this book. What you don't like about this book is not its style or its mysterious story. It's the writer's way of thinking and seeing the world that doesn't satisfy you. It's like you read The stranger by Albert camus and say this guy must be crazy how could he not cry for his mother's death??!!! But that's exactly the point. That's the philosophy of the absurd that camus believed in. So I guess you're not questioning the story, you probably has a problem with understanding the whole idea and the main meaning of the book. Hedayat was one of the best. He may rest in peace.
Rating:
Summary: dark and wonderful.
Review: i just finished reading the blind owl, and it IS one of the best books i've ever read. the first section is very dark and symbolic and contains a lot of repetitions - a picture within a picture within a picture. i rather wish the book had contained more chapters like this. it was too wonderful for words. the second section detailed the unraveling of the main character in his daily tangible life: his feverish confinement to his room, his growing anxiety, his sense of pervasive and impending doom, which extended beyond himself to the whole of mankind and nature. unfortunately, since my background on iran and ancient persia is somewhat wanting, i think i missed much of the historical symbolism that other readers have mentioned, and had swallowed it mostly as a psychological novel. i'm going to reread it and also look for some kind of a supplement. read this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Drawn nails
Review: I'll tell you, first thing, without a word of a lie, I was looking forward to reading "The Blind Owl". I'd heard the right noises (odd coos of approval and comparisons with other writers I liked) in the right places (other cool novels, hip joints packed to the rafters with swinging cats, that kind of thing) and I approached it (reluctantly, the way you approach anything you want to savour) like a dish of my most-favourite food, prepared to bite a hunk off, roll it over my tongue and press it flat against the roof of my mouth. I wanted to be surprised. I wanted it to better expectation (I never expected this food to melt like snow, who could have predicted that aniseed-y fennel aftertaste, that kind of thing). Because you have hopes. You have hopes for any new book (the way you have hopes for anything you invest yourself in). Here is a book written by a friend and contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre. Here is a book written by an intense bird-faced man from Persia who later killed himself for one of the multitude of never-to-be-understood reasons men kill themselves. Here is a book that has been described as a narcotic suicide note. Although there are five chapters, the book essentially divides pretty evenly into two halves: the first three chapters make up part one, the last two chapters part two. When you start reading, you are not disappointed. The book is peculiar. Dated like Kafka or Canetti but contemporary, dark and dreamlike (think Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled"). The food-y metaphor I was kicking around earlier is sort of apposite: "The Blind Owl" reads like a bubbling cauldron of something indiscriminate (it's been bubbling so long you can no longer tell precisely what went in there to make up this stew). The opium-addicted narrator mourns an ethereal lost-love (possibly glimpsed in narcotic stupour, possibly imagined, possibly dreamt) and you detect a pinch of Goethe's Werther. There is a cackling coachman and an angel-faced girl. Surely Bulgakov's 6ft cat can't be too far behind? A dead body is discovered in a bed. Do we alert the police? No. We hack the body into several large pieces and pack it up into a suitcase. Morality has gone. Think Edgar Allen Poe, think Magnus Mills. So much for part one. Part two (disappointingly, you can't help but think disappointingly) changes tack. I want to say that part two discards part one but that isn't entirely true. Images recur. Motifs circle back on themselves (the fish with the tail in its mouth). The reader is forced to decide for themselves what precisely went on. You tend to believe part one is a dream conjured from the sick-bed of part two. The narrator is ill, poisoned with jealousy and confined to his bed. He spends his days quietly absorbing the world around him (the cackling Turk at the end of the road with his wares spread out before him on the ground, his nurse, his adulterous wife), letting the world around him short-circuit his already opium-wired fuses. (The stew that was bubbling in the cauldron has burned to the bottom of the pot.) You are reminded of the way Proust's narrator suffered at the hands of Albertine and self-doubt (but the reminder only serves to distract from what Hedayat is doing, the reminder only holds the book up to the light and the book suffers as a result). The second, bed-ridden portion of the book is the real (diseased) body here. The trek you set out on in part one evaporates. You're in the middle of the countryside with no idea how you got there. You're disappointed. You can't help yourself. You're reminded of Knut Hamsuns's "Hunger", another book that disappointed you. You don't stop reading, but the reading feels like insomnia, feels like a night spent hunched over in sorrow, wide-awake and needing sleep. You read and it is like bone-ache. I wanted "The Blind Owl" to be a lost classic (and a kind of great tragedy, like John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces" - one of the funniest books ever written and overlooked until after Toole's own early death). Instead, I am left with the impression made upon me by Samuel Johnson's "Rasselass": "Rasselass" clocks in at something under 120 pages, but it took me longer to read that than to read "Our Mutual Friend". Whole host of reasons but primarily because the reading experience was akin to drawing nails or losing teeth. Nobody wants or needs (or has the time) for drawn nails.
Rating:
Summary: health catastrophe
Review: one of the most important aspects of "Blind Owl"is its potential to be interpreted in so many different and even opposing ways.
each of us based on our cultural and psychologic background understand it in our very unique way.
This is actually a common finding in all such masterpiece works.
iranian ultranationalists find their ancient Persian Paradise in
Blind Owl.We know that Owl is a Fortune bird in our ancient mythology.So it has not been chosen by chance.The important question is: is this multi-interpretability designed on purpose
by the writer or it is genuine.Based on similar masterpieces like
Hafiz Poetry the answer is no i.e: it is genuine.In fact Hafiz is the best proof.there are people who find deep spiritual and religious experience in Hafiz and there are yet other people who
find Hafiz a frank disbeliever and this is fantastic.
Rating:
Summary: Hedayat was the Blind Owl
Review: Sadegh Hedayat did not write a novel. This was his autobiography. A rather macabre tale that in reality ended in a small apartment in Paris. Hedayat had written himslef into a corner in which only he could have freed himself and he eventually did. This book is a masterpiece of incomparable beauty. It will quite possibly change your life. You will never read another book quite like it.
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