Again a book I started on Saturday and finished on Sunday. Sluiers van Teheran by Nina Rasmussen narrates the experiences of a Danish woman who travels around Iran on her own. I read the book in the Dutch translation, but I couldn’t find if the book had been translated into English (or any other language, for that matter).
For me, the most interesting and informative part of the book, was its female perspective. The writer’s experiences are those of a (Western) woman in a society that is not very woman-friendly. Nina Rasmussen describes her own experiences with always being dressed according to Islamic laws in which women have to cover their hair and cannot show any flesh except their hands and their face, with the segregation of the sexes in public life and with the ways (unrelated) men and women still get in touch and communicate with each other. She pays a lot of attention to the situation of women in Iran and the relationship between men and women. As her travels progress and she spends more time in Iran, Rasmussen also starts to see the ways in which Iranians try to circumvent these strict rules and how they deal with the religious police that controls the people’s behavior and dress-code in public.
To be honest, other than this female perspective, I didn’t find the book very remarkable. Rasmussen basically narrates her travels without providing a whole lot of background information. Already on the first page she mentions she didn’t have the time (or was just too lazy) to learn even some basic Farsi or to read about the country. Instead, she just decided to trust that everything would turn out okay. I can see the author’s point about not planning much and just seeing what will happen (isn’t that part of the fun of travelling around?), but I found the lack of willingness to learn more about the country and the language a bit annoying. I can’t even explain exactly why it bothered me, maybe it was the fact that she already throws this in on page one and I soon got bored by her story.
Much of the first half of the book, Rasmussen is preoccupied with feeling bored and alone and having to wear the chador all the time. She finds it hard to get in touch with people, not just because she doesn’t know the language, but also because she is a woman on her own. She complains that she doesn’t know the language and therefor doesn’t meet many people, and those that she meets don’t speak much English. Rasmussen is annoyed by standing out as a woman alone, and a foreigner at that and by having to deal with the unwanted attention of men staring at her or trying to touch her breasts in busy places. Soon, this got rather boring and I was starting to wonder if it would go on like this.
But halfway through, Rasmussen meets Shahin, a Kurdish man who joins her for the rest of the trip. Things do pick up from here, because there is less complaining, more interaction with people along the way, and there is even a tiny bit of romantic expectation (will they or won’t they? They won’t eventually.). My favorite parts of the book are those where she stays with people for some time and gets to know them and their way of life better.Despite the improving story, I kept having the feeling Rasmussen is basically racing around the country, unable to entertain herself and getting bored in places where they don’t meet people.
Eventually, Rasmussen gave me the impression of being a Western woman unable to adjust to and getting bored in the different, slower pace of life in Iran. Partly, I completely understand this from my own experience in Armenia. Life, especially outside of the capital, just goes slower here as well and both men and women spend a lot of time sitting, doing nothing, gossiping and drinking coffee. Men do this some place outside the house, women gather together at home and sit in the kitchen. It takes time getting used to and if it lasts too long or happens too often I get nervous and bored as well. But for a while, it can be relaxing and bonding in a way.
In short, apart from the female perspective, Sluiers van Teheran doesn’t really get beyond the average travel book for me.
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You may well have already read it but I thought ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ by Azar Nasifi was a very interesting take on a woman’s life in Iran.
That not wanting to learn even basic Farsi or Iranian history would annoy me too. It’s fine *at first*, I guess, because in the end it’s only a novelty, and it’s always, always better to have an informed perspective. Thanks for reviewing this one!
This sounds like one that might have caught my attention, but ultimately I would feel as you do. I read books set in foreign lands as a way to learn about the culture and people – I think I would be annoyed with this author’s stubborness not to learn the language…and then complain about not being able to communicate! I have Reading Lolita in Tehran on my shelf to read in 2008
I should add for the record (so as not to totally discredit her!
) that Rasmussen did pick up some Farsi while she was traveling.
I have never read Reading Lolita in Teheran. I’ve heard a lot about it, though. I’d like to read it, also because I have another book about life in Iran written by a woman on my TBR-pile, Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi, the human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Price a few years ago.