Description

Carola's other Tode tells the story of a love affair between a German and a Persian, who had to flee to Germany with his family, from the point of view of three narrators. A new masterpiece of Falakis in terms of exile literature - a successful combination of linguistically well-rounded literature and an astute crime novel, exciting to the last line.

Reviews and Interviews:

Mahmood Falaki: "The Shadows" and "Carola's Other Deaths"

Book review by Susanne Roden

Iran, a country you hear a lot about, but in the end you don't hear much that is positive about the situation in the country. One thinks one has an idea of ​​life in Iran, one thinks of famous Persian poets such as Rumi or Hafiz, who also influenced other poets such as B. Goethe, but this beautiful impression pales in comparison to many other reports.
So many people have had to leave the country. There are a lot of Iranians living in Hamburg, that is well known, also in other big cities, like e.g. B. Berlin. I know quite a few, including artists, doctors and writers. If you follow up, they all speak Persian, with strong similarities to words in Kurdish. This is not surprising, since Persian also belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family and, as the most important Indo-European language, is spoken by more than 60 million people as their mother tongue. The term Persian comes from the time of the Sassanids (Pārsīk or Pārsīg) and is derived from the old Persian core province of Fārs (Pārs) in southern Iran. Due to the Arab-Islamic conquest of Persia by the Arabs in the 7th century, Persian then became Fārsī (فارسی;) – the Arabic language does not know the p sound – so it became an F. In the Middle Ages, New Persian developed into an important literary language, which also had a strong influence on the Turkic languages ​​in the eastern Islamic world, e.g. to the Ottoman language.

The Shadows | I hold the novel "The Shadows" in my hand. A small hardbound volume, the cover is violet-blue, the title's writing across the margin, the author's last name meets the word shadow right at the end horizontally.
A staircase can be seen, a golden frame, in which a man in a coat and hat stands as a shadow, and in front of it on the staircase another shadow.
I read the blurbs, translated from Persian, left the country for political reasons. So what does that mean. writing in exile.

How do you deal with being persecuted at home, being threatened, being tortured, waking up sweating every night and thinking, now they're going to get me.
The country where you were born, where friends and family live, where you know every blade of grass from the neighborhood, the language, the smells, the feeling of being safe when all of a sudden that doesn't exist anymore. If you have to flee in the dark with only the essentials in a suitcase or even with only your clothes on your body, leave everything behind just to survive.

Mahmood Falaki was already writing poems and stories as a teenager. He later studied chemistry and library science at the universities of Tehran and Ahwas. His works are socially critical and so he was sentenced to three years in prison under the Shah regime in 1976. He is sent to the notorious Evin prison on the northern outskirts of Tehran.
After the February 1979 revolution, he was released and was able to publish his first volume of poetry, Sickle over the Wheat. Shortly thereafter, he is persecuted again, this time by the mullahs' government. He was able to emigrate to Germany in 1983 and has lived in Hamburg since 1986, where he studies German and Iranian Studies at the university. Mahmood Falaki works as a writer and lecturer in Persian language.

In his novel "The Shadows" Mahmood Falaki takes us to the north of Iran, to the Caspian Sea, to his homeland, to where he was born. He describes events that took place at the peak of agrarian reform during the Shah's reign.
After more than thirty years, the first-person narrator tries to clarify the truth about his uncle's murder by consulting his childhood self. Through the portrait photos from his youth hanging on the wall, he tries to establish contact with his own past in order to bring the memory back to life. "A memory is like a stray dog, it can be drifted anywhere. I also want to introduce my characters in this way. And you didn't tell me who that was... I hadn't finished my sentence when ME returned to its photo.”
He goes through the stages of an adolescent boy, beginning at the age of eleven and ending at the age of fifteen. In a wonderful, imaginative language, Falaki describes life in the village, the everyday crafts and domestic duties observed through the boy's eyes, which develop into mythical creatures in his youthful dreaminess, he kidnaps us into daydreams under the shady tree, entices us into the sun-warming nap together with colorful beetles and loses us as readers in the longings of an adolescent boy who discovers his first love, and yet does not forget to look at the perspective of women and at their duties in their role as servants for the good of the man in the patriarchal society in the harsh family life.
The narrative I changes several times within the book and also in paragraphs, sometimes even within the description of an event. One moment the author's youthful self is describing a situation he observes a domestic servant's daughter is in, and in the next paragraph the self slips to the perspective of the young girl herself and she continues the story.
The events are presented very interestingly and from different perspectives thanks to the well-chosen, interlocking narrative style. You learn about different people living together, the mother, the little sister, the aunt, their different views and feelings that vary in the respective life situations, and you gradually learn different truths that, when put together from small details, result in a mosaic picture in the end .
The publication in Persian took place in 1997 in exile in Germany, publication in Iran is not possible.

Carola's other Tode | And then another new release by Mahmood Falaki is on the shelf: "Carola's Other Deaths". What a title, wonderful, since I love crime fiction so much.
But this novella turns out to be much more exciting than you would expect from a normal crime thriller. As in the novel "The Shadows", the author also uses the technique of alternating first-person narrators here, but not quite as dizzyingly finely interlocked. The novella is divided into a "First Narrative" in ten parts, followed by an unexpected "Second Narrative" to end with a "Third Narrative" and a kind of full stop. The first account takes up about half of the book, and the other two accounts together make up the second half.
The first-person narrator Behrus Panahi begins with the description of a dream that later contains recurring elements and images reminiscent of Rodin's characters.
Behrus Panahi, an interesting choice of name, because the meaning of Behrus or Behrouz in Persian is "good day" (beh: good, rooz: day) and there the relationship to the Kurdish "rojbaş" (baş: good, roj: Tag), and the last name Panahi does not seem to be a coincidence either, as it is reminiscent of Jafar Panahi, one of the most important independent filmmakers in Iran. He studied film and television directing in Tehran in the 1980s, just around the time Mahmood Falaki was getting out of prison.
That Jafar Panahi is then arrested with his wife and daughter at his home by the Iranian police on March 1, 2010, is taken to Evin prison without charge and remains detained for three months, only after hunger strike and numerous international protests and payment of bail from The author could not have guessed that 200,000 US dollars would be released on May 25, 2010 at the beginning of the criminal proceedings. Jafar Panahi is sentenced to six years in prison, a 20-year ban from working, no interviews, no trips abroad. Accusation: propaganda against the system and preparation of riots after the elections through films critical of the regime about the elections.
So his participation in the February 2010 Berlinale on the topic "Iranian cinema: present and future, expectations inside and outside the country" was thwarted and the international audience was clearly shown how things are in Iran.

Our hero in the novel, Behrus Panahi, has been condemned to be a newspaper shop owner or newspaper seller due to the circumstances that force one to do so in exile in order to be able to keep one's head above water. Water also plays a central role in the descriptions. In interwoven flashbacks of the experiences in the asylum seekers' home after arrival in the host country, while walking along the Alster, long-forgotten incidents, everything is mixed up with life, with daydreams, overlaid with experienced traumas, helplessness as with the use of violence during demonstrations, everything is analyzed, merges with the now, gets lost in the flowing water and leads to inner isolation, emptiness and slipping into another life reality in a state of limbo.
The experiences from the past, which led to leaving the country, which were taken into exile, unprocessed, unresolved, repeatedly catch up with the narrative writer Behrus in small parables.
The problems while settling into the new environment, the missed opportunities for a new orientation with the establishment of new contacts, the inevitable isolation due to the preferred meeting of compatriots and friends from home, but also the very typical reactions and romanticized misinterpretations towards you "Orientals from the Land of Poets" through the people he comes into contact with through his work in the shop or on his walks.
The novel tells about the past, experiences and interpersonal relationships with such intensity that you can feel in every line how personal experiences have been processed.
Many literary quotations are woven in, such as the eternal desire to fly, coupled with the Icarus myth of crash and death, or the simply interjected "I'm waiting for Godot". He also took the opportunity to use Günter Grass' statement on the occasion of the awarding of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to Yasar Kemal in 1997 that he was ashamed to be a German as the basis for a discussion in the café with an acquaintance, which led to a violent one backlash from her. “He didn't mention again that Günter Grass was ashamed because Germany had sold arms to the Turks, who had used them against the Kurds. He feared Carola's forehead would shorten and shorten their evening together. However, it was 'pride', the fifth word in Carola's dictionary, that lowered Berhus' forehead. Carola said she was proud to be German. And Behrus could neither inhale Günter Grass' 'shame' with the cigarette, nor exhale Carola's 'pride' with him. He believed the fate of words was similar to the fate of people suffering some burden that had nothing to do with them. Like his own destiny caught between two words that had nothing to do with him (didn't they?).”

In contrast to the changing first-person narrators in "The Shadows", Mahmood Falaki now also changes the narrative style in "Carola's Other Deaths". In the part "Second Description" the narrative is strung together in short, concise sentences. No detailed sentence formulations are used, but a simple, condensed monosyllabic style appropriate to the situation prevails. I immediately think of Camille Claudel, sculptor and muse of August Rodin, who after the death of her beloved father was placed in a closed institution by her mother and brother for the last 30 years of her life. Buried alive and simply forgotten by the whole world, doomed to vegetate.
The “Third Description” then has a slightly different narrative style, based more on the style of the first part, but still has its own style, since the first-person narrator has changed again.
The already wonderful descriptions in the daydreams of the young first-person narrator from the novel "Die Schatten" are increased in this novella. You see colours, feelings, dreams and things that develop a previously unknown life of their own that can make you dizzy . Mahmood Falaki also describes initially insignificant events from an unfamiliar perspective with wonderful sensitivity and allows the reader to use casual observations, e.g. B. the reactions of a terrier to the presence of Behrus on a walk, where the reader also gets to know Hamburg in a completely relaxed manner.
I was deeply impressed by both books in terms of the intensity and density of the writing style and it is gratifying that there are these translations from Persian, which enable the reader to get to know the works of an extremely interesting, complex and critical author from Iran better.

Mahmood Falaki is a member of the Association of German Writers (VS).
In 1992 his short story "Verirrt" was published, in 1995 the collection of poems "Lautlose Whispering", in 2003 his novel about life in Iran in the 1960s "Die Schatten" and in 2009 "Carola's other deaths".

Im: Kurdistan-Info, 2012

Mahmood Falaki. Carola's other Tode. Translated from the Persian by Susanne Baghestani.

Bremen (Sujet Verlag) 2009., 170 pp., EUR 12.80

The Persian writer Falaki (b. 1951), who has lived in Germany since 1983, deals with a significant psychological problem of a person living in exile from the perspective of a protagonist. Wavering between two cultures, the focus of his life turns out to be unstable, and the contours of his loved ones become blurred. The Persian Camelia turns into the German Carola and vice versa. His attempt to capture her mentally and physically from three different perspectives also fails. Carola's other Tode ends in visions of a resurrection, in which the fascinating description of Persian love culture mixes with the German, sobering culture of exile. A crime novel that unmasks alienation in each other's cultures.

week, May 2010

In magazine: Public

Annotations for "Toiletries" - Verdi redaktion.publik@verdi.de

Hamburg thriller with an Iranian perspective: "Carola's other deaths"

A different kind of crime thriller is the novella “Carola's other deaths”. The literature lecturer living in Hamburg Mahmood Falaki describes the emotional world of two people with completely different horizons of experience. It tells the story of an exiled Iranian who falls in love with a German woman in Hamburg. The initially somewhat confusing story pulls the reader under its spell and ends with an unexpected resolution.

Von:  George Fisher

In: The Berlin Literary Criticism, 22.12.09

"Carola's other Tode“

is a successful combination of linguistically well-rounded literature and an astute crime thriller. From the point of view of three narrators from completely different cultures, their perception and approach to the same events is told. This often misleads the reader. Mahmood Falaki's protagonist, an exile, is in a state of limbo. Gradually he becomes more and more alienated from his family and his compatriots living in Hamburg. In an outstanding way Mahmood Falaki the subject of being strangers and being strangers to oneself and writing a profound thriller that looks behind the scenes.

26.April 2010

Literaturzentrum Hamburg

In Mahmood Falakis Roman Carola's other Tode" - Nothing is safe. In the tragi-comic novel "Carola's other deaths" the realities interweave and constantly arise in contradictory variants. Each of the three narrative perspectives claims a different version of reality, and the crime novel-like elements also lead on the wrong track. No narrator and no events, neither the Hamburg present nor the Iranian past of the protagonist Behrus can be trusted. In a state of uncertainty between cultures, identity ultimately disintegrates into an iridescent kaleidoscope.

Mahmood Falaki, "Carolas andere Tode", Sujet Verlag

Harbour Front Literaturfestival

June 2010