In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran

Christopher de Bellaigue is a British journalist who lives in Tehran (or did at the time he wrote In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, in the early 2000s) with his Iranian wife and son. He is then, well-positioned to think and write about Iranian culture and society for a western audience, but with an insider's nuance.

What de Bellaigue does best is modern Iran: the traffic; the nuances of buying a car, and why new rarely trumps used; the contradictions. If he had written an entire book on the Iran of today (or 2002, say), the entire work would have been a joy. He writes, as one would expect of an author whose byline has appeared in such stalwarts of the Western press as The Economist and the New Yorker, beautifully, using short, snappy prose to bring emphasis, irony, or humor as needed. That said, a reader can only remember/differentiate so many mullahs, so many generals, so many wounded veterans of the Iran-Iraq war. To say I was bogged down in the politics is an understatement, and quickly I learned to skim passages on the competing ideologies that led to or stemmed from the Revolution.

While Iran's relationship with the world today is largely defined by its standoff with the U.S. (and on which side of that standoff others nations choose to align themselves), de Bellaigue deftly raises the issue of the collective West's long history of meddling in the Middle East (see: Hero), writing, "Two centuries of semi-colonization sometimes seem worse than unambiguous colonization; at least the unambiguously colonized got railways and sewers and unambiguous independence."

The Iran-Iraq war looming as it does over so much and so many in Iran and the larger Middle East, de Bellaigue also plucks at the threads of U.S. involvement, not least the Iran-Contra affair. That U.S. arms - to both sides - increased the firepower and made the bloodletting that much greater is clear, only reinforcing one of the central tenet's from Notes on a Foreign Country: U.S. decisions directly impact the lives of those in other countries on a regular basis, in a way that is difficult for Americans to appreciate. (Although the global experienced with Covid-19 may offer a taste.)

The most telling exchange occurred toward the end of the book, as de Bellaigue is discussing the present and future of Iran with one of the few Iranians he considers a friend, Mr. Zarif. In thinking about the state of the country, Zarif draws a corollary with the state of the Iranian-made Paykan, the butt of more than one joke throughout the book (and country, it seems). Zarif says, "When I get into my Paykan and it lurches and coughs, I think to myself that the men who made it aren't well enough trained or paid, and that they have bad equipment and are badly managed and didn't sleep well last night. ... On the few occasions that I've been in a Mercedes and been astonished by its mechanical perfection, don't you think I've asked myself if the men who built this car are better off?"

Food for thought.

Four stars.