Your smile.
There wasn't one.
You never smiled.
Born in Tehran but living in Germany, the eminent writer SAID has
suffered two forms of exile. Forced to leave Iran for political reasons,
he was also separated from his mother shortly after his birth when his
parents divorced. At the age of forty-three, however, SAID received word
that his mother was traveling abroad and wanted to see him. Landscapes
of a Distant Mother is the account of their wrenching reunion. A memoir
of longing and loss, the book offers a haunting portrait of a son's
broken relationship with his mother and the Islamic dictatorship that
shadows both their lives.
Landscapes of a Distant Mother gives English-speaking readers an
introduction to one of Europe's most important immigrant writers.
Unsentimental and spare, the book chronicles the discomfiting sensation
of viewing one's mother as a stranger and all the psychological
implications of their mutual disappointment. SAID's distance from his
mother--whom he describes almost clinically, with her particular way of
speaking, the style laced with religious formulas, inclined to
emotionalism, self-pity and expletives--becomes a measure of the
alienation he feels from everything around him. His book gives voice to
the full meaning of modern exile--its political force, profound sadness,
and perpetual yearning.
