Much of this work of fiction is like a spreading sore, the pain it causes sharp and relentless, dulled only by the fog of opium and dream which makes it bearable. There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker. (D.P.Costello's 1957 translation is a valiant and interesting effort, but it's high time someone had another go at this (if only to try a completely different approach).) The writing ranges from the incantatory to the raw there's no doubt, too, that much is lost in translation. Without a clear 'plot' and often hallucinatory, The Blind Owl is also anything but a lucid text or story. The Blind Owl is the foremost work of twentieth-century Iranian fiction and remains tremendously influential, a Kafka in a literature that, while very rich, has no towering counter-balance such as a Mann, Hesse, or Musil. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. A book of opium.' - Mathias Énard, in Compass A violent book, of a savage eroticism, where time is an abyss whose contents come gushing back in deadly vomit. Each reader must decide for himself whether the Emperor has in truth found a splendid set of new clothes, or whether he is parading naked.' - Alfred Leo Duggan, Times Literary Supplement For the rest, even reviewers are not infallible.

'The publisher explains that the original was written in a striking form of demotic Persian, in which colloquial words take the place of standard literary phrases D.P.Costello has translated it into literary English, so that this particular effect is lost.

The Blind Owl has been filmed several times, including by Kiumars Derambakhsh (1975) and by Raoul Ruiz, as La chouette aveugle, in 1990.

There have been several other translations of The Blind Owl, including Iraj Bashiri's (1974).

The new (2010) Grove edition comes with an Introduction by Porochista Khakpour.

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The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat