Author Marina Nemat follows the light in her new novel

Mistress of the Persian Boarding House

Marina Nemat

Viking Canada

“I want to remind the world that decency and kindness matter.”

It tells you a great deal about Iranian-Canadian author Marina Nemat that she is able to speak these words with such gentle conviction. She has never shirked writing about the unspeakable horrors she suffered as a teenager at the hands of the Iranian government. So she knew she would again be entering dark places when she decided to honour the memory of a much-loved grandmother in her new novel, Mistress of the Persian Boarding House. But in writing it, Nemat was, as always, drawn to the light at the end of the tunnel. Goodness, she insists, can still prevail in the midst of evil.

Her grandmother’s story begins shockingly amid the carnage of the Russian Revolution and ends in a mid-1950s Iran on the cusp of renewed emotional and political turmoil.

Talking about it now, Nemat doesn’t mince her words. “Honestly, I think I could never have survived what my Baboo went through.”

Given Nemat’s own personal history, it may seem a surprising admission: After all, as a freedom-loving teenager in the early years of the Islamic revolution she was imprisoned for two years and underwent torture for offending Iran’s fanatical Khomeini regime — and narrowly escaped the death penalty.

Nemat, the daughter of Russian-Iranian Christians, wrote about these traumatic events in her 2007 memoir, Prisoner of Tehran, an international bestseller published in 28 countries. But now, with this fictional recreation of her beloved grandmother’s own turbulent life, she found herself navigating her way again through her own terrible memories and deciding that they paled in comparison with her Baboo’s anguish.

“We have a lot of similarity in our lives,” Nemat, now 61, tells Postmedia from her home in eastern Ontario. “She also went through a state of revolution — in another country.”

In writing this novel, she knew she would have to stitch together known fragments of a real but often elusive life, but she also knew she would be bringing happiness to her aging father who had grown up in the boarding house of the book’s title.

So yes, there might be much that she had to create and imagine in tracing the arc of what she believed to be a life worth remembering. “There were these little bread crumbs — little things — but I couldn’t always be sure they were true,” she acknowledges. “For example, she did come from a wealthy family — but how wealthy? I don’t know.”

Writing in the first person, Nemat assumed the voice of Zina, born into the glitter of upper-class Russian society, her life upended by the Bolshevik Revolution which plunges her into a nightmare of vengeful murder, imprisonment, ruthless interrogation and sexual brutality. With her husband and adopted daughter, she manages to escape to Iran — and to further personal loss. But she finds refuge at a modest boarding house which provides a blessed sanctuary for women like herself — outsiders desperate to rebuild their lives.

In a narrative that covers several decades, Nemat seeks to recreate her grandmother through the character of Zina who remains courageous and resilient throughout.

Nemat’s affection for ordinary Iranians is palpable. She talks about the “decent, kind, generous human beings” who still endure in a proud and ravaged land that was once considered the cradle of civilization. But her book is arriving at a time of renewed violence that leaves her heartbroken.

“Iranian identity and Islamic identity are two separate things,” she points out. “Wherever I look there is devastation. I have never believed that military intervention in Iran is going to lead to lasting change. I have always believed that because I lived through the Iraqi War. No matter how much people hate their government, that will go on the back shelf and people will rally around that government. When missiles are falling and homes are being burned and there is fear, they will rally around it.”