FIRST PUBLISHEDin Persian in Los Angeles in
1996 under the title Hamnava’i-e shaban a-ye
orkestar-e chub-ha (Nocturnal Harmony for
Wood Orchestra), Harmonie nocturne is the
first novel of Reza Ghassemi’s career, which
already includes several plays. The main
character of Harmonie nocturne is an anony-
mous Persian man who lives in Paris but on
Tehran time, meaning that he works all night
and sleeps most of the day. This sense of
there being two parallel times, opposite sides
of the day during which people lead their
lives normally and simultaneously, pervades
the book as a structuring image. The narrator
himself, a timid, withdrawn individual, lives
much within himself and within the small
world of his apartment house. He lives part-
ly in 1943, when he was younger and had a
family, and partly in a time close to the pres-
ent when most of the action takes place. In
addition to the narrator and his neighbors in
an old apartment house, there are invisible
presences, partly visible ones, characters
such as a dog who goes by different names,
and the narrator’s shadow. These characters
derive from books or movies and affect him
powerfully. He suffers from a psychological
condition he calls “lapses in continuity,” pe-
riods when he is in yet a third time-frame,
interacting with characters seen only by him.
Consistent with this, for example, is the fact
that his mirror shows only inanimate objects
but not his own reflection, so he must shave
entirely by touch. To understand people who
are a puzzle to him he paints portraits of
them. While the narrator lives in two time
sequences, the landlady, forgetful in her old
age, lives only in the present moment.
The narrative is fragmented, broken up not
only by changing time-frames but also by the
author’s technique of writing in short sections
of only a few pages and then jumping
abruptly to another time, locale, or situation,
a technique that reflects the fragmented state
of mind of the narrator. We are told almost
nothing about the world outside the apart-
ments and a local café, so it is difficult to
judge just when any particular action is tak-
ing place. At the end of the novel the narrator
seems to have turned into the landlady’s dog.
The cinemalike interplay of realistic narra-
tion, dream fantasy, and surrealism is artful-
ly handled. A central act of violence helps
focus the various strands of narrative, and a
remarkable resolution at the end helps keep
Harmonie nocturne within the realm of experi-
mental fiction. As a playwright, the author’s
sense of the theater may have contributed to
the form of this novel. The translation is ac-
curate and colloquial and represents well
what the Persian text says. When the two
versions are read side by side, however, the
story somehow seems to be more comfort-
able in its Persian dress than in French.
William L. Hanaway
University of Pennsylvania

Asia and The Pacific Reviews