“Two Steps Back to the Line” is the first experience of Puri in novel genre. He is well known in Iran as a veteran translator of poems by renowned poets including Nazim Hikmet, Anna Akhmatova, Federico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda.
The novel narrates the story of a man who is interested in the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and he meets her during his imaginary travel to Russia.
Translators are more familiar with world modern texts so that their writings in other literary genre are valuable, author Ladan Niknam mentioned during the session.
The realistic novel is from first person point of view and the character has some similarities with Puri himself, she added.
Although the story happened in the narrator’s mind but he is not an inactive character and all through the story the author only reports his external actions, she mentioned.
Puri avoids sentimental-woman cliché in his novel. In this story the wife of narrator is a wise woman who analyzes her husband’s reactions in different situation, she said.
“The book shows that human is controlled by time and place. We live in a place but we travel in time,” she mentioned.
She described the ending of the novel a surprised one. She said that it did not satisfy her expectations.
“I have problem with the structure of the story. The scattered events interrupted the story’s rhythm. The characters are flat ones who are conservative too,” Fereshteh Ahmadi commented on the book.
She said that the atmosphere of the story is not a realistic one and it resembles teenager novels in the way that the story has a reliable narrator who access to all information and all problems are solved by Deus ex machina.
“Even the end of the story is like teenager novel. The end of the story is predictable and that is victory,” she said.
Mohammadreza Gudarzi called the equality of man and woman as a significant characteristic of the novel in which women acted wiser than men.
The novel is role upon two kind of history one is real and another imaginative and that makes the story ironic and Puri wants to prove that history is repeated in present time during the novel, he mentioned.
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MNA