In A Picture Out Of Frame our sympathy is wholly engaged. A boy grows up in poverty in Iran; he goes to the capital; he receives a letter from a friend; he is in exile. Nothing else happens. It will break your heart.
The prose is simple like that of Juan Ramón Jiminéz in Platero and I. (Yes there are donkeys here too.) But the village life so lovingly portrayed is on the brink of tragedy. That fate is precariously held in balance; its extent is only fully revealed in the letter received at the end. Aidani's deft ability to hold back in the face of overwhelming odds justifies his deliberate simplicity of style. The structure is invisibly subtle.
A meditation on the connections between reality, imagination, past and its present, this is a challenging book with revealing emotional richness. It tells the story of a young man who speaks in the third person in order to examine what he saw and suggests that this story could be anyone’s when invasion, war and terror dictates. The book invites the readers to be the real witness of its character’s narrative and observe how he shares his shattered world with us. The narrator invites us to think about the power of memory and its expression in our lives.
A Picture Out Of Frame is ultimately both hopeful and challenging, revealing how urgently the West and the East need to embark upon an understanding of each other.
[From the publisher's website]
