ToHellWithPublishing

The literary equivalent of having a bad trip on your hols in 1930s Persia, Sadegh Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl is a heady, cannibalistic feast for the senses. Narrated by an opium-smoking necrophilia-enthusiast, the book is possibly the most horrific love story ever written, following a painter of pen-cases’ descent into psychosis over a woman whose mouth tastes like ‘the stub-end of a cucumber’. While his fancy-lady may not sound like the greatest catch, the narrator has his own eccentricities too; for example his morbid preoccupation with death, a penchant for sniffing corpses, as well as a wife he enjoys calling ‘the bitch’.

The best thing about reading The Blind Owl is, now and again, you get the feeling you’re losing your mind, too. Throughout, you find passages loaded with a sinister sort of deja vu, whereby the same mystical sentences get repeated over and over, like the book’s somehow putting a powerful hex on you, against your will. Recurring motifs  like ‘a cypress tree, a bottle of snake-poisoned wine, and blue flowers of morning glory’ parade through your brain like flesh-eating worms.

It may come as no surprise that Hedayat topped himself not long after penning his masterpiece. The Blind Owl is not the cheeriest of books, and it’s certainly not to be confused with Jill Tomlinson’s playschool kiddie classic, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark. Hedayat’s owl may well make you scared of the dark, though. It may even make you scared of the light. But what’s for certain, you’ll never look at the cucumbers in Sainsbury’s the same way ever again. Or the bottles of wine. Or the flowers. Or the knives.