Man of My Time by Dalia Sofer

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14, 2020

Man of My Time is told from the agonized perspective of a man who regrets being the person he allowed himself to become. As countless people who serve brutal leaders have done, the narrator considers whether survival is worth the cost of living in disgrace. He comes to understand that survivors avoid disgrace by growing into a personal mythology. The distance between mythology and reality, though, is the distance that the mythical figure must place between himself and everyone he has ever cared about.

When Sadegh Mozaffarain is cremated, his son Hamid visits New York, meets his brother, and returns to Iran bearing part of his father’s ashes. Most of Man of My Time is told in memory as Hamid recalls the life that alienated him from his father and later from his wife and child. Sadegh was a professor at Tehran University and an official in the Ministry of Culture who spent a lifetime constructing an encyclopedia. Sadegh explains to Hamid that he was against the system until he became the system — a dynamic that will replicate in Hamid’s life.

As a young man, Hamid performs an evil act that symbolically (and in a sense actually) destroys his father. Having demonstrated his capacity to betray his own family, Hamid is offered a job as a prison interrogator. Hamid claims he meant well when he took the job, although the alternative would have been to submit to an interrogation about the graffiti that he scrawls in Tehran, signed “Man of Revolt.” While he enjoyed playing the role of revolutionary gadfly, Hamid was less committed to an ideological cause than he was to impressing a student he hoped to seduce.

Hamid feels “a pang of loss” for his revolutionary days but grows into his role as an interrogator all too comfortably. Hamid, who once used art as a means of expressing support for revolution, becomes a religious censor and judges the fate of artists and others who stray from a righteous and permissible path. The job leads him on a journey that darkens his soul.

While Hamid’s parents and brother escape the revolution  by moving to the United States, Hamid stays in Iran. “Freedom with no lifeblood has no meaning for me,” he tells his brother.

Hamid meets Noushin when he interrogates her about a foreign film found on her VCR. They marry and have a daughter named Golnaz. Their lives seem happy until Hamid is overtaken by the ideology of his masters. He becomes seduced by the Ayatollah’s promise to end oppression by submitting to the rule of God over human affairs. Noushin comes to regard him not as a husband but as a “warden with a wedding ring.” She leaves him five years before Golnaz leaves. Hamid’s insistence on enforcing a strict moral code on Golnaz, and to use force to accomplish that end, extinguishes his relationship with his daughter.

Hamid eventually betrays friends just as he betrayed his father and just as his father betrayed friends. Despite an inevitable epiphany that causes him to regret the choices he has made, Hamid is not so foolish as to believe the choices can be undone. He can move forward, try to atone, attempt to reconnect with Golnaz, but the novel makes clear that nothing can undo the past. He will forever occupy "a skipped generation, a hiccup in history." His father lived in a time of relative intellectual freedom while his daughter's generation doesn't "want to hear about your revolution any more. We want good friends, devoted lovers, nights of music, days of discourse and ideas. It's life we want, and love . . . ."

Dalia Sofer does not try to make the reader sympathize with Hamid. Rather, she provides insight into how the life of a man like Hamid might develop and how he might deal with his grief when he realizes he has constructed a life based on self-deceit. Sofer’s prose is an exceptional blend of elegance and power. The book is quotable and timely. It is a book that will always be timely unless the world finally rids itself of oppressors who impose their religious edicts on those who are do not have the kind of power or freedom that allows them to live as they please.

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