One of my favorite living novelists is Salman Rushdie. His books boil over with the overcrowded feeling of India. Characters, generations, subplots, images—they are all constantly sprouting in a chaos that turns out to be carefully controlled. Rushdie has absolute control over his creations, and his overriding metaphor is always The 1,001 Nights. His books take place in a world that acknowledges and celebrates the numinous and mythic…and yet he’s so thoroughly anti-religion. How can he write about this world of “magical” happenings and an unseen divine hand and yet ignore these things in his real life? Well, he has some pretty good reasons. But I have always thought that he, like Alanis Morissette, is just a step away from seeing Christ for who he is. If only there were something closer to a Christian Salman Rushdie.
And, reader, there is! Daniel Nayeri’s incredible memoir, Everything Sad Is Untrue, brims with the same Eastern story structures and also is structured around The 1,001 Nights. Yet his is a true story of his family’s exile from Iran upon their conversion to Christianity and their resulting journey to a life as refugees in Oklahoma.
Nayeri is just as capable and clever as Rushdie, with the added challenge of telling true events in a satisfyingly narrative way. Narrated by his twelve-year-old self, his story is tragic and inspiring and always eminently ordered and cohesive. Themes and images weave throughout the text with the ease of a constructed fiction, and one of his points is that all our lives are just that. Memory is patchy and patchwork. Different witnesses describe the same event with startling dissonance. And as we grow temporally—and in his case, geographically—farther away from our memories, they become even more unsteady and even more precious.
This is a rare and superb book by a true talent. Nayeri has the gift of describing the ineffable with economy and wit. His life is a series of miracles that could easily be mistaken for a trail of forsaken tears. His treatments of faith, religion, and spirituality are all insightful and lived-in. He knows of what he speaks.
This book is also incredibly informative. Written to an intended audience of Westerners, the book acts as a primer in Persian identity, the intricacies of Islam, and a foreigner’s view of America. By setting the book in his middle school years, he creates a recentness for his refugee journey. Yet you can always hear the adult Nayeri speaking behind his young narrator with the wisdom and perspective of age.
Everything Sad Is Untrue is funny, moving, heartbreaking, and enlightening—all while remaining one distinct thing. It’s not often that I read contemporary books, but this is exactly the exception that I am always hoping for.
Carrie loved this book. I listened and didn't finish. Perhaps I need to hold it and read it undistracted.