The Blind Owl

✍ Scribed by Sadegh Hedayat

• Publisher: Grove Atlantic;Grove Press
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 81 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Recognized as the outstanding Iranian writer of the twentieth century, Sadegh Hedayat is credited with having brought his country's language and literature into the mainstream of contemporary writing. The Blind Owl, long considered a classic and often compared to the works of Poe, chillingly recreates the labyrinthine movements of a deranged mind.

The young woman who haunts the narrator is first introduced as a stranger with jet-black hair and wide, haunting eyes. She creeps into the narrator's room but he realizes, upon touching her, that she is lifeless and cold. The narrator, a painter and opium addict, packs the woman's corpse into a suitcase and takes her to an remote spot along the banks of a river, where he buries her. Along the way he meets an old man with a spine-chilling laugh who becomes the first in a stream of recurring mental images: four cadaverous black horses with rasping coughs, a hidden urn of poisoned wine, a sheep butcher, and a small painting of a...