My Uncle Napoleon - Literary Significance and Reception

Literary Significance and Reception

My Uncle Napoleon was written by Iraj Pezeshkzad and published in 1973. Loosely based on the author's real life experiences and his love for the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat, the story instantly became a cultural reference point and its characters national icons of the '70s. The novel was translated in 1996 to English by Dick Davis and published by Mage Publishers, a translation that manages to evoke the richness of the original text and is faithful without being literal (Asayesh 1996). The English translation has since been re-published by Random House in 2006 with an introduction by Azar Nafisi and an afterword by the author, Iraj Pezeshkzad.

The novel is a rich and comic representation of the Iranian society of 1940s, though many characteristics of the story's various characters can arguably still be seen in today's Iranian society. The garden in which the story takes place, "in more ways than one becomes a microcosm of modern Iranian society" (Nafisi 2006). The novel, at its core a love story, unfolds around the young narrator's delicate and pure love for his cousin Layli, a love which is constantly jeopardized by an army of family members and the hilarious mayhem of their intrigues and machinations.

Many phrases and colloquialisms first introduced in the novel have since found their way into daily Persian usage. The most notable of which is "Uncle Napoleonism" or to call someone "Uncle Napoleon", which refers to a belief or a person who believes in conspiracy theories that foreigners, specially the English, are responsible for Iran's misfortunes. Also of note are "going to San Francisco", a euphemism for having sex and "to the grave it's ah... ah...", a phrase used to mock a person who is visibly lying.