The House of the Edrisis: A Novel, Volume Two

＂Like all revolutions, this one too has led to a regime more despotic than the one it replaced.＂ So observes an omniscient narrator in Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s monumental novel The House of the Edrisis, offering a darkly comedic glimpse at the aftermath of an unnamed twentieth-century uprising. In this concluding volume, the revolutionary tumult that has consumed the aristocratic Edrisi family and their opulent mansion shows no signs of abating.

As a ragtag band of squatters-turned-rulers consolidates power through surveillance and intimidation, the novel’s eccentric cast of characters is forced to reckon with upended social orders. Erstwhile revolutionaries become complicit enforcers of a new authoritarian regime, their lofty slogans of liberation curdling into doublespeak. At the center of this story stands the ancestral Edrisi manor--a fading palace that seems to contain multitudes. Its once-vibrant gardens and courtyards, rendered in lush descriptive passages, now serve as haunted stages for madness, romance, violence, and philosophical reflection in turn. Lauded as a crowning achievement of modern Persian literature, this first-ever English translation of The House of the Edrisis in two volumes offers an unforgettable immersion in one writer’s vision of the perils and pathos of a world remade by revolution.

Ghazaleh Alizadeh (1947-1996) was an Iranian poet, novelist, and short story writer. The House of the Edrisis was awarded a prize for the best novel of ＂Twenty Years of Fiction Writing＂ by Iran’s Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance in 1999. Her short stories include ＂The Crossroad,＂ ＂After Summer,＂ and ＂The In-transitory Journal.＂

M. R. Ghanoonparvar is professor emeritus of Persian and comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published widely on Persian literature and culture in both English and Persian. He is the translator of In the Alley of the Friend: On the Poetry of Hafez.