Then the Fish Swallowed Him
A powerful and harrowing psychological portrayal of an individual struggle against the state written in the tradition of The Stranger and 1984, Then the Fish Swallowed Him is an urgent expose of how power can bend reality and the people forced to live within its parameters.
Yunus Turabi, a bus driver in Tehran, leads an unremarkable life. A solitary man since the unexpected deaths of his father and mother years ago, he is decidedly apolitical—even during the driver’s strike and its bloody end. But everyone has their breaking point, and Yunus has reached his.
Handcuffed and blindfolded, he is taken to the infamous Evin prison for political dissidents. Inside this stark, strangely ordered world, his fate becomes entwined with Hajj Saeed, his personal interrogator. The two develop a disturbing yet interdependent relationship, with each playing his assigned role in a high stakes psychological game of cat and mouse, where Yunus endures a mind-bending cycle of solitary confinement and interrogation. In their startlingly intimate exchanges, Yunus’s life begins to unfold—from his childhood memories growing up in a freer Iran to his heartbreaking betrayal of his only friend. As Yunus struggles to hold on to his sanity and evade Saeed’s increasingly undeniable accusations, he must eventually make an impossible choice: continue fighting or submit to the system of lies upholding Iran’s power.
Gripping, startling, and masterfully told, Then the Fish Swallowed Him is a haunting story of life under despotism.
The author, Amir Ahmadi Arian, is currently living in New York and teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center. He wrote this novel for his MFA at NYU under the mentorship of Joyce Carol Oates. He was the translator into Farsi for Cormac McCarthy among others, and a noted journalist. His has been published in The New York Times and The Guardian. His article, “Fragments from a war-torn childhood”, published in Guernica made waves for his heart-wrenching and eye-opening story of growing up in Iran.