Set in a Notorious Prison, a Novel Probes Iran’s Torturers and Their Victims

fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THEN THE FISH SWALLOWED HIM By Amir Ahmadi Arian “Crime is something relative,” Mohamedou Ould Slahi writes in “Guantánamo Diary,” his memoir of imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay, where he was held for 14 years. “It’s something the government defines and redefines whenever it pleases. ” Such whispered warnings drive the tension in “Then the Fish Swallowed Him,” a story of entrapment and torture in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, and the first novel written in English by Amir Ahmadi Arian, an Iranian-born former journalist who now lives in New York.

In 2005, a lonely Tehrani bus driver named Yunus (after the prophet Jonah, who is swallowed by a big fish) attends a union strike. Shaken by a changing Tehran and worsening conditions for the working class, he has read Foucault, Al-e Ahmad, Marx, Engels and other political writers. After the bus drivers’ strike turns violent, Yunus becomes a scapegoat for the whole operation. In prison, he isn’t a simple man who stumbled into a movement; he is its doomed architect.

The strangeness and physicality with which Arian depicts Yunus’s prison life makes for a convincing, unnerving read. He invites us to notice the taste of prison tea, the heightening and dulling of sensation after torture, the bliss of a power outage that offers prisoners a few hours of night. When Yunus begins to unravel, befriending a fly, reliving the death of his parents and walking around his cell as if it’s the city, he is poignant and tragic. Arian offers straightforward and astute observations about Iran’s attitude toward Western powers and about the social history of modern Tehran.

His insights into the lives of the city’s poor at a time of mounting inequality, and on the effects of sanctions and Western media on average Iranians, are gripping. I was struck by his description of a car ride during which prison guards discuss smuggling Western medicine to a sick child and the appeal of becoming refugees themselves. But Arian’s talents are primarily journalistic; too frequently his novel reads like a political lecture.

“If his eye is keen, his ear — for poetic English, at least — is not, and he often produces off-key prose garbled by mixed metaphors: “The cacophony I had lived in my whole life came to me in strands of sound tangled like yarn.”