The Lion Women of Tehran

Review: 3.5 stars

This was my pick for our university girls' book club. With everything happening between Iran and the United States, I wanted to understand, even a little, what it might have felt like to live as a woman in Iran, across some of the most pivotal decades in the country's history. Kamali tells that story through a friendship, which turns out to be exactly the right vessel for it.

'The Lion Women of Tehran' follows Ellie and Homa from childhood in 1950s Tehran through three tumultuous decades. Ellie, lonely after her father's death and newly improverished, finds Homa on the first day of school. Together they dream of becoming "lion women", strong and fearless in the face of whatever comes. Class pulls them apart when Ellie's family reclaims its former privilege, politics pulls them back together, and one devastating betrayal rearranges both of their lives.

Kamali's writing extracts exactly the feelings she intends. You feel your own fingers curl with embarrassment when Homa arrives at Ellie's posh new high school, the smell of the downtown markets still on her, resurrecting Ellie's past of poverty. You experience the visceral shock when Ellie discovers the means through which her mother secures their family's return to their former, wealthier neighborhood.

It reminded me, inevitably, of Ferrante's 'My Brilliant Friend,' one of my favorite books. The architecture is similar - a formative friendship between two girls who take sharply different paths, each watching the other live the life she did not choose. Kamali is honest about how complex that bond is, the undercurrent of competition, the way you can love someone and yet still harbour pangs of jealousy. Despite the trials they endure, Homa and Ellie's friendship is unified always by the intimate bonds forged from being sisters by choice, not blood. Whatever else passes between them, that foundation holds.

The character I admired most was Homa, and her singular tenacity and sense of purpose in fighting for women's rights. Underneath it all, a question I kept turning over: how much do you owe your country? There is a tragedy of the commons in watching others risk their lives for freedoms you would enjoy if they won, knowing you would be no worse off if they lost, since you were never complicit.

The trappings of Ellie's life, the wealth, the beauty, the well-matched husband, make for much easier reading. Part of you enjoys the fairy tale and does not want it blemished by real life. But it is Homa's imperfect, fire-forged life that draws you in. A dark past, an unspeakable period of tragedy, things Ellie can only look upon with pity. Yet through it all, Homa refuses to succumb to victimhood.

By the end, the lionesses of the title step fully forward, each having asserted herself in very different ways. Homa most directly, in her covert efforts against the traditionalist regime, until she arrives at the bleakest realization of the book - no matter which men are in charge, they need someone to subjugate, and that class is invariably, women.

I missed the actual book club discussion, but the verdict that reached me afterward was warm. Everyone liked it and considered it an easy read but an equally touching one. It is a well-written, absorbing story with enough literary grit to make it a worthwhile, though not fully memorable, read. I know very little about Iran, and this book was a small window into what is fought for there, what is won and what is lost.

Hot Milk

Review: 4 stars

I love browsing bookstores, especially with my sisters. On a trip to Toronto last fall, my older sister shared some of her favourite reads with me as we were perusing the stacks at Type Books on Queen. The one that got me intrigued was ‘Hot Milk’ by Deborah Levy. Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker, the novel follows Sofia and her mother Rose, on their Hail Mary journey to Almería, Spain for a cure for Rose’s mysterious limb paralysis.

In the opening pages, we learn that 25-year old Sofia is being inducted into adulthood, awash in the jarring taste of one’s first major failure. “The dream is over for me. It began when I left my lame mother alone to pick the pears from the tree in our East London garden that autumn I packed my bags for university…It ended when she became ill and I abandoned my Ph.D.” Over the course of the novel, we see Sofia become the foil to her previous self as she wades into new shapes and forms of being. She changes her occupation from ‘Waitress’ to ‘Monster’ on a health intake form over subsequent visits to a seaside first-aid hut. The stifling heat, incessant jellyfish stings and her pent up madness and desire have swirled into a combustible being. Sofia has emerged anew. She triumphantly frees a murderous dog from an abusive owner, takes a first aid student to be a lover and then takes Ingrid, a seamstress and her muse, also as a lover.

The irresistible tide of the Andalusian pilgrimage sucks Sofia in and upends the predictable prison she has created in her mind and the physical constraints of being her mother’s legs. At one point, Rose considers amputation to rid herself of the limbs that fail her. In actuality, her limbs are already severed from her, yet tethered to her - Sofia is her only source of mobility. A daughter as an extension, yet separation of one’s own self. As the novel reaches its conclusion, the severance becomes permanent - mother and daughter are more estranged than ever. One living an ever smaller, shorter, boxed-in life, and the other bursting with possibility, melted by the hot Spanish sun into something malleable, finding its organic shape day by day.

The writing is gorgeous, experimental and bold. Passages read like poetry, and Levy plays with form throughout - bulleted lists punctuate chapters, as do grammar-defying lines such as “I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised”. Just like hot milk, the writing froths over the reader, with only a pale residue remaining long past the last page, a stubborn mark that refuses to be forgotten. A searing, complex and enthralling read.