Bookreporter.com - PRISONER OF TEHRAN: A Memoir by Marina Nemat

PRISONER OF TEHRAN: A Memoir
Marina Nemat
Free Press
Memoir
ISBN-10: 1416537422
ISBN-13: 9781416537427

Tied tightly to a pole, Marina Nemat, age 17, watched the firing squad level their rifles and prepare to end her life.

But they never fired at her.

Several fellow prisoners in Tehran's brutal Evin prison were executed that night, but Marina was spared, literally at the last minute. A pardon from Ayatollah Khomeini himself had commuted her sentence to life imprisonment. One of her prison guards had fallen in love with her and interceded on her behalf. But her salvation came at a heartwrenching price: Ali, her protector, wanted to marry her --- with the stipulation that if she refused him, her own family would be subject to arrest, torture, perhaps even execution.

Marina Nemat has no previous track record as a writer beyond articles in her high school newspaper in Tehran, but she tells this incredible story with grace and eloquence in this engrossing memoir. She offers no outright acknowledgement of ghostwriting help, so take her at her word --- this is her own account, subject to the usual reservations about fading memory and the need to protect the identities of others.

Marina, a member of Iran's tiny Christian minority, comes across in her own words as a spunky teenage political activist, but also as somewhat naïve. Born in 1965, she was dismayed by the excesses of the radical Islamist regime that had taken over Iran when the Shah was driven out. She attended anti-regime street demonstrations and wrote protest articles in her school newspaper, but seemed oblivious to the consequences of such actions. Like any teenager, she was more preoccupied with adolescent crushes and summer vacations on the shore of the Caspian Sea.

Her dream world collapsed in 1982 when she almost accidentally fomented a student strike against teachers who ignored classroom subjects in favor of nonstop Islamist and political indoctrination. She was sent to Evin, brutalized and hounded for the names of other student collaborators. Then came the night when she faced the firing squad. As she was being driven away she heard the gunfire that killed her fellow prisoners.

As dramatic as that episode becomes in her narrative, the extraordinary emotional tangle of her relations with Ali, with his family, and with her own boyfriend and parents is just as gripping a story. Almost against his will, the reader actually finds implacable Ali in many ways an attractive person, sincerely concerned for the welfare of the girl on whom he has visited such misery and fully understanding of her trauma. His family too welcomed her with evident good will, in sharp contrast to the coldness of her own parents, especially her unaffectionate and distant mother.

Marina told Ali plainly that she did not love him, but she went through a conversion ceremony and an Islamic wedding out of dread for what might happen to her own family. In an unskilled writer's hands all this could degenerate into macabre soap opera, but Marina Nemat writes with such conviction that the reader agonizes with her. I kept wishing she would rebel and denounce her tormentors to their faces. She seemed oddly complaisant to her smiling enemies --- until you remembered what rebellion surely would have meant for her and her family.

The layers of irony only get deeper as events unfold. Ali is suddenly assassinated by Islamic hardliners for his dalliance with an "infidel." Marina is finally freed from Evin after two years there, but only through the intervention of Ali's father, a seemingly decent man who risked his own life to restore Marina to her family in accordance with his dying son's last wish. Her savior was the same man who had insisted that Marina convert to Islam before he would allow the marriage.

Marina Nemat eventually married her faithful sweetheart Andre --- a risky move but one she took unflinchingly --- and was allowed to emigrate to Canada where she now lives.

This book is obviously a form of catharsis for her. That is a worthy aim, of course, but beyond that she has drawn for us some complex characters --- her unsympathetic parents, Ali's genuinely human family --- with a sure literary hand. If you read this book you will not forget them. What more could an author desire?

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)

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