Volume 48, Number 10 · June 21, 2001
Love Among the Ruins
By Patricia Storace
The Persian Bride
James Buchan
Houghton Mifflin, 343 pp., $23.00
James Buchan's recent remarkable novel, The Persian Bride, can be read and enjoyed as a romantic thriller about a young Englishman's search for his kidnapped wife in the aftermath of the fall of the last shah of Iran. But Buchan's adventure story is also an artfully detailed homage to Persian culture, and a kind of hybrid offshoot of Persian literature. The Persian Bride combines the English thriller genre with an archetypal narrative of Persian literature, the quest for the beloved, which is also a quest for a mystical experience of the divine. Grandly romantic, but unsentimental, The Persian Bride alludes to ecstatically tragic classic Persian love tales like Layla and Majnun by the twelfth-century poet Nizami, a writer much admired by Calvino, or the story of Khosrow and Shirin from Ferdowsi's tenth-century epic, the Shahnameh, a poem central to Iranian literature. In these poems, as in Buchan's story, love is both a salvation and a harrowing.
Review, 5355 words
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