Unravelling the knots

Aziz's Notebook presents a damning picture of a society that turned on its own.

Aziz's Notebook, that weaves together the notes of an old Iranian man struggling to make sense of the state's killing of his daughters, the commentary of his anthropologist granddaughter Chowra Makaremi, the author of the book, and family letters written in the early 1980s immediately after Iran's Islamic Revolution, is both moving and revelatory. Revelatory because the rest of the world still hasn't confronted the magnitude of what happened in Iran during those years when the theocratic state set about destroying everyone - including the Mujahedin or Left-leaning Islamists, who had enthusiastically supported the revolution - with even a slightly different agenda to their own.

HT Image

Chowra Makaremi, author of 'Aziz's Notebook'. Raj K Raj/ HT Photo