Written in Persian, it tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, the narrator, who sees in his macabre, feverish nightmares that 'the presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary. Jason Jorjani’s Novel Folklore is a stunningly original interpretation of The Blind Owl and an original philosophical work in its own right. The Blind Owl (1936) is Sadegh Hedayat's magnum opus and a major literary work of 20th century Iran. Their business here is to re-write their past by re-engineering the folkloric substratum of human consciousness and identity. We think of them as “aliens” because we are alienated from our own future possibilities. These beings are addressing us from our own future. On Jorjani’s reading, The Blind Owl is ultimately about the “Imaginal” metamorphosis of humans into higher beings. Jorjani reveals Hedayat’s complex appropriation and adaptation of libertine Gnostic and antinomian Tantric ideas and argues that he aimed to reestablish Iran’s perennial role as the cultural crossroads of the Western world and the Indo-Buddhist East. In Novel Folklore, Jason Reza Jorjani, whose grandfather was best friends with Hedayat, offers a revolutionary interpretation of The Blind Owl.

This belief is no doubt influenced by Hedayat’s own suicide in Paris in 1951. Often compared to the classics of Existentialism and Gothic horror, The Blind Owl is widely believed to be cursed, so that anyone who reads it seriously is driven to suicide. Sadegh Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl is widely considered to be the greatest work of modern Persian literature. By the same token, Hedayats work, especially The Blind Owl, has been the subject of a greater number of literary and extra-literary studies in Persian and other languages than the work of any other modern Iranian writer.

The blind owl hedayat