The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen
In Shokoofeh Azar’s intricate fabulistic novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, an Iranian girl comes of age in a time of war.
When a gowkaran tree—likened to the Tree of Life, though no one seems certain about its origins—erupts in a mansion, the residents build a table around it. This event sets off an adventure-filled tale about the family’s children, whose forays into a palace of mirrors and other locales are relayed by a teenage raconteur, Shokoofeh. As her fertile memories unfold alongside the 1979 Iranian revolution and its aftermath, the dead and the living help her to grow.
Lovelorn Shokoofeh moves between fever dreams in which prophets and others visit her, adolescent milestones, and her first love. Meanwhile, her relatives hold fascinating secrets, as with her white-haired sister, who swings in the tree and vanishes, and the Zoroastrian matriarch, who prides herself on tending a fire that’s burned for millennia. Ancestral ghosts contribute to the mysterious cast, which is bound by a dynastic lineage too.
Tehran is explored using magical realism, with nods to political conflagrations. Shokoofeh’s revelations about violence under the new regime highlight the stress of these changes on citizens, but the otherworldly intermingling of generations prevents too much bleakness. The book’s ranging approach to time, in which lives and stories within stories overlap, results in hope that surviving the Iranian republic is possible. Indeed, sometimes younger Shokoofeh can only fathom it all from the vantage of near myths; even as hard truths encroach on her life, her will never erodes.
A powerful historical novel of warring enchantments and pains, The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen follows as the hardy branches of an Iranian family face wartime.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
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