Description

The late 1960s in Frankfurt are politically and socially turbulent times in which old certainties begin to falter. Especially for Mahtab, who immigrated from Iran with her husband and three children a decade earlier. With her salary as a nurse, she makes a significant contribution to the family's upkeep, and her command of the German language is also getting better and better. For a long time everything was right in her life. But now things are threatening to slip away: her daughter Azadeh is demonstrating against the Vietnam War instead of studying for her high school diploma, wears a miniskirt and takes the pill; Her husband Amin obviously has an affair with his accountant and she herself has to fend off the advances of an admirer. Mahtab finds himself in a dilemma on several occasions. Torn between her traditional moral concepts and the freedoms as well as the shallows of modern western life, she has to assert herself and find her own way.

Reviews:

For a long time I didn't see the essence of the novel, but simply followed the well-told, twist-filled story. The message lies more in the nuances, the contradictions that arise in me, even towards Mahtob. In the time and spacelessness that I perceive more and more.

– read into life more

Djafari tells the story exclusively from Mahtob's perspective. He modeled it on his own mother, he says in an interview. It's not her biography, but she is similar in type to her: reserved and quiet. Her husband Amin also reminds a little of his own father. He was a very caring and loving person. But everything else is literary constructed and invented, says Djafari.

– Sojitrawalla program, taz more

Nassir Djafari sensitively describes the characters on 330 pages and gives the reader an insight into contemporary history.

- Gerrit Mai, FNP Taunusmore

About Nassir Djafari:

"In any case, there is a debutant who does not have to prove anything to anyone, who can be fully involved with himself and his story, clever and without any vanity, always connected to the matter, the topic - this is mature literature in the very best sense, excellent.

– Ulrich Noller,WDR Cosmo on “One Week, One Life”more

The search for an arrival:

Frankfurt, the wild sixties: Mahtob, the eponymous protagonist of Nassir Djafari's second novel - after his famous debut "One Week, One Life" (Bremen 2020) they are anything but wild, rather stormy.

She, her husband and daughter came to Germany from Iran in the 1950s. The 1950s themselves were turbulent times in their home country: in 1953, the Americans and British put the democratic head of state Mohammad Mossadegh out of office because he wanted to nationalize the oil industry, and reinstated the military regime, which was not very gentle with its critics. Many Iranians went into exile in those years, many to Germany.

Mahtob is rather conservative and doesn't quite manage to really arrive on the Main. Her husband Amin has set up a household goods business, but is more concerned with political debates with other exiles than with business. And daughter Azadeh seems to be completely slipping away from her: she is wearing a miniskirt, demonstrating against Vietnam and the Shah, and when Mahtob discovers the pill in her daughter's belongings, her world collapses - even more than when she realized that her husband had one having an affair with his accountant. And the fact that the chief doctor makes advances to her while she is working in the hospital throws her into new conflicts of conscience.

Even if it sometimes seems as if Djafari would lose himself too much in his characters' love affairs in his new novel, he still manages to paint a coherent picture of that time and, above all, the recurring intrusion of the political into the private sphere, the upheavals of world politics in the life of ordinary people. While Mahtob still has enough to nibble at the loss of her home and the adjustment to the new one, her family threatens to gradually break up. Old ideas she's had all her life are shattered, and when Azadeh suddenly disappears, her parents have to pull themselves together - against all odds. – Gerrit Wustmann in ROCKS No. 90 (5/2022)