My father, with a particularly oily smile: We have no copy. I was determined to get my hands on our copy. My teenage years could be characterized by obsessions with all sorts of things I knew nothing about, and The Blind Owl was no exception. Every few years the book would inevitably come up in conversation and I would prod, but still nothing but that same silence. There was something in my father’s uncharacteristic reticence that made me push further. When I inquired about it my father said it was a masterpiece of Persian literature, written before he was born. The Blind Owl-it sounded not unlike the titles of my children’s storybooks. I was barely double-digits when I first heard the title Buf-i Kur. But there was one book, a notable book, we did not have a copy of, whose absence I was soon enough made to not just feel but to crave so ardently that it almost makes sense to me why I’d end up here, of all places. We had it all: walls and walls of the apartment I grew up in in suburban Los Angeles were lined with books, Persian and English. Among the many places I was forbidden to go as a youth was through the pages of a book that didn’t even exist in our bookshelves.
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