Description

The story of the two brothers Aidin and Urhan takes place between 1940 and 1970 in the northern Persian city of Ardebil. The father trades in dried fruit at the bazaar and wants to pass on his thriving business to his children. But Aidin, the mother's darling, has no interest in business and commerce, instead developing a love for books and beginning to acquire knowledge himself. Not so his materialistic brother Urhan, who shared with their father a suspicion of Aidin's literary interests, a suspicion that resulted in the cremation of Aidin's books and manuscripts. Sister Aida and brother Yussof, a cripple, also live in the house. Aida is kept in the house under the strict father's control, he lives almost like an animal in a pen.

Reviews and press:

pearl diver:

"Disruption and decay, violence and hapless passion” has seen Angela Schader prevail in this novel. "The Symphony of the Dead" was published in 1989 as the first novel by the Iranian Abbas Maroufi, who has been living in exile in Germany since 1996, as the reviewer explains in her presentation of Maroufi's novels. Very impressed, she explains the multi-layered network of the novel, which sets the quarrel between Cain and Abel in Ardebil in northern Iran (...) more

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

With the “Symphony of the Dead”, Abbas Maroufi wrote a thoroughly Persian novel, despite or precisely because of its use of Western stylistic devices, which combine happily with the elements of the Persian literary tradition. The work will contribute to the further emancipation of prose in Iranian literature, which is sometimes still overshadowed by the centuries-heavy burden of great poetry. more

qantara.de:

Abbas Maroufi, born in Tehran in 1957, was one of the most respected writers in Iran when he left his homeland for Germany in 1996. It was only thanks to the intervention of the German writers' association PEN and the support of Günter Grass that he was able to leave the country. Volker Kaminski spoke to Maroufi. more