Sadeq Hedayat’s novel Blind Owl is brief, curious, and often disquieting. It tells the tale of a man who paints pen-case covers, who paints the same image again and again—and old man sitting beneath a cypress tree, an alluring young woman offering him a water lily, a stream running between them. And he is haunted by this image, and especially by the woman in this image—who may also be his wife, his cousin, his mother? The setting of the novel keeps shifting, the props in the novel keep reappearing, and the characters all seem like hazy echoes of the two figures in the painting. Chris and Suzanne try to stay grounded as they discuss this marvellous gem of Iranian modernism.

Content warning: The book contains some potentially disturbing imagery, and so does our discussion.

Thank you to Michael Collins for helping us edit this episode.