Shining Dead

What emerges is a novel of exceptional quality – on the one hand, an intensely palpable depiction of the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, as it unfolded from a child’s perspective, and on the other hand that child’s view of his surroundings, born as he is in the year the war breaks out and thus, at the age of seven, utterly alive to the daily stock of beauty, boredom, colourfulness and deadlock. (...) The child’s sensory awareness of the world around him and the constant pressure of the war accompany each other, set premises for each other, and as such form the emotional imbalance that makes Shining Dead a hugely powerful novel.

The first small signs of war and dictatorship are perfectly balanced against more personal and more universal observations, and by local knowledge of the kind that can’t be found in reference books (...) Remembrance and forgetting have been a central concern for Shafieian in both his poetry and his essays. The author, who came to Norway from Iran as a young man, has taken his own experiences as a starting point in Shining Dead. But the language’s workmanship and the free associations of memory work mean that the book fulfils the requirements of the novel genre as well as it does for autobiographical authors such as Sunde, Knausgård, Espedal and Hjorth. In not too many years I reckon it will be natural for us to talk about Shafieian as being alongside the very best.

Mazdak Shafieian’s novel about a childhood in war-torn Iran is profoundly moving. (...) It’s a convincing debut. On the one hand, Shining Death is a form-conscious examination of memory which moves between the present and the past in elegant sweeps; on the other, it’s a shocking tale of the horrors of war and the reign of terror in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Anyone who wonders whether Shining Dead is a detached and fractured account of traumatic experiences will quickly understand that this is not the case – because the novel is gripping.