My Father's Notebook
When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate, deaf son of a Persian nobleman, travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael - a political dissident in exile - attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script . . . and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.
My Father's Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.
Kader Abdolah (a pen name created in memoriam to friends who died under the persecution of the current Iranian regime) was born in Iran in 1954. While a student of physics in Tehran, he joined a secret leftist party that fought against the dictatorship of the shah and the subsequent dictatorship of the ayatollahs. Abdolah wrote for an illegal journal and clandestinely published two books in Iran. In 1988, at the invitation of the United Nations, he arrived in the Netherlands as a political refugee. He now writes in Dutch and is the author of novels, short stories and works of non-fiction.
Susan Massotty is a translator of Dutch into English. She has translated works by Kader Abdolah and Margriet de Moor, as well as Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. She won the Vondel Prize for My Father's Notebook.