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A review by uhambe_nami
Spijkerschrift by Kader Abdolah
5.0
An Iranian man living in the Netherlands tries to unravel his past through the entries of a notebook written in an incomprehensible cuneiform script. The notebook was written by his deaf father, who never learned to talk or read, who knew his way in the Iranian mountains like no other, who communicated only in sign language with his son and others in his family. What Aga Akbar could not communicate, he wrote down in his notebook.
Spijkerschrift is an exotic story of mountain caves and Persian tapestry, of Shi'a traditions and the pit of the holy Mahdi, the twelfth successor of the prophet Mohammed. But at the same time, this is Dutch literature of the finest quality, with references to [a:Douwes Dekker|3367032|Multatuli|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1288021057p2/3367032.jpg] and [b:Max Havelaar|326280|Max Havelaar Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company|Multatuli|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348307150s/326280.jpg|1413754], [a:Slauerhoff|744652|J. Slauerhoff|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1240501732p2/744652.jpg]'s poetry and Frederik van Eeden's [b:De Kleine Johannes|2282695|De Kleine Johannes|Frederik van Eeden|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1249747083s/2282695.jpg|2288891]. Abdolah has put more than a bit of himself in this book, and it's hard to say which country he loves the most: Iran, the country of his youth and his father, or his adoptive country of polders and dykes and cloudy skies, where people live on what used to be the bottom of the sea. A wonderful bridge between east and west, a bridge I'll gladly cross again and again.
Spijkerschrift is an exotic story of mountain caves and Persian tapestry, of Shi'a traditions and the pit of the holy Mahdi, the twelfth successor of the prophet Mohammed. But at the same time, this is Dutch literature of the finest quality, with references to [a:Douwes Dekker|3367032|Multatuli|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1288021057p2/3367032.jpg] and [b:Max Havelaar|326280|Max Havelaar Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company|Multatuli|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348307150s/326280.jpg|1413754], [a:Slauerhoff|744652|J. Slauerhoff|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1240501732p2/744652.jpg]'s poetry and Frederik van Eeden's [b:De Kleine Johannes|2282695|De Kleine Johannes|Frederik van Eeden|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1249747083s/2282695.jpg|2288891]. Abdolah has put more than a bit of himself in this book, and it's hard to say which country he loves the most: Iran, the country of his youth and his father, or his adoptive country of polders and dykes and cloudy skies, where people live on what used to be the bottom of the sea. A wonderful bridge between east and west, a bridge I'll gladly cross again and again.