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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

At least to the kind of Iranians who were sending their children to French schools, yes.

But of course the other kind of people very rarely have someone writing international bestsellers on their behalf, so this is all we’ll get.

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I think it's a very well written personal memoir that shows what the revolution felt like to someone growing up in the Iranian urban upper class. It portrays the revolution as there being a hope for change, prior to religious men with beards and guns inexplicably showing up because that's what did happen from her perspective. I don't see anything necessarily wrong with this. The revolution was split between college-educated urban secular leftists and a much larger portion of religious conservatives, and the latter eclipsed the former so quickly that her viewpoint is probably legitimately what it looked like for her and her family. It doesn't try to do any political analysis of what motivated the Islamists or why they gained power because it's her personal story, it's not trying to be some sort of objective history of the Iranian revolution. I think it does what it set out to do very well, and it's an excellent story of the tragedy of just trading one oppressive dictatorship for another.

Adding to what you said, it's worth to mention that her novel contains grave historical inaccuracies such that suggesting that the Cinema Rex fire was done by the Shah blocking the exits with police letting everyone burn, and later blamed on Islamists (what the revolutionary zeitgeist at the time wanted to believe), while in fact it was exactly the other way around

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_Rex_fire

Sorry, I was imprecise. What it must have felt like to some iranians. I'd love to hear if you have tips for books that show other experiences from that period!

And ? the author couldn't have written it from the pov of someone else. youre asking someone to do something that cant be done, and then blaming them for not doing it ?

There’s no “blaming” here at all, just the observation that books that are considered to be representative of a certain culture are often only representative of that culture’s elite.

Ok. I thought that was well known.

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