French authors Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir rub shoulders with the likes of Jewish theologian Anne Frank and Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in Tehran bookstores where the female readers mostly pick up foreign writers.
“Women from Iran read more, translate more and write more. In general, they are more present in the book market than men,” said Nargez Mossavat, editorial director of sales publishers.
A woman picks up a book at a bookstore on Enqelab Street in Iran’s capital Tehran
(Photo: AFP)
“Books are essential to me, they are the only refuge, which sometimes makes me angry,” said the 36-year-old author, without living within the confines of cultural life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. .
As a publisher, “I choose books that speak to our society today”, she said, celebrating work by Mandelstam, who died in Gulag, or the novel “Minor Apocalypse” by the writer Polish dissent Tadeusz Konwicki.
It is “an excellent book that reports on social and political experiences similar to ours,” she said.
“They tell us that other people have also gone through bitterness, cruelty, and survival.”
Reza Bahrami, 32, manages another major publisher’s bookstore, Cheshmeh, which means “source”, and said its “reader is 70 percent female.”
Manager Reza Bahrami poses for a photograph at a bookstore of Nashre-Cheshmeh Publishing House in Tehran
(Photo: AFP)
“There’s a lot of excitement and anticipation around new publications and this is driving sales,” he said, surrounded by books at a Cheshmeh store on Karim Khan street.
If censorship is present in an Iranian publication, it affects content that is largely considered licensed, and many Western best sellers are quickly translated and available there the Iran, where copyright is not recognized.
Karim Khan, along with Enqelab Street (Revolution), is one of two roads in central Tehran to which readers come, famous for being chockablock with bookshops.
Female readers are first looking for “romantic” books or thrillers, Bahrami said, such as those by Americans Sidney Sheldon and Mary Higgins Clark or British crime writer Agatha Christie.
But their interests go far beyond those species, according to a browser at the Cheshmeh store.
Wearing body-covering clothing, the woman in her 30s said she had just earned her doctorate with a “dissertation on the writing of female writers” and recently attended the conference of Beauvoir The Second Sex.
A 58-year-old university professor hunted for books to help him answer questions from his students about the murder of French high school teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded by an Islamic terrorist at a side school outside Paris in October after showing his pupils cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.
An Iranian worker poses for a photo at a bookstore on Enqelab Street in Tehran
(Photo: AFP)
“One of my main concerns is the issue of freedom, and in particular freedom of expression,” said the professor.
Featured on many exhibits in the Iranian capital is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity by the Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari, translated into Persian.
What Mary Trump told too much and Never Enough was published in July on her uncle US President Donald Trump has also hit the shelves, where The Book of Gutsy Women by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton can be found and memorial to US first lady Michelle Obama.
Not all best-selling foreign books have sold out recently, however.
In Cheshmeh in November his sales went up with 1939’s Ask the Dust by American writer John Fante and Troubled Sleep, published in 1949 by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Also flying off the shelves was The Suicide Shop by French writer Jean Teule and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, published in 2013.
A woman walks past books on display for sale on a pavement on Enqelab Street in Tehran
(Photo: AFP)
But even though Tehran’s bookstores are full of plentiful and diverse titles, “printing has become slower” since the 1979 Islamic revolution, said a 51-year-old bookseller, who claimed that to be named.
“There are a number of reasons, from the state of the economy to censorship and brain drainage,” he said. The price of books has been made more prohibitive for some.
In a country where some ultraconservative leaders were denying the truth of the Holocaust, Javad Rahimi, a salesman at Sales bookstore, noted the recent success of Tattooist Auschwitz, by New Zealand writer Heather Morris, and the Diary of Anne Frank, with the young Jewish girl from Amsterdam who died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945.
Anne Frank ‘s diary is very popular in Tehran
(Photo: AP)
According to Rahimi, the Plague by Camus and All Men Are Mortal by de Beauvoir rose “to the top of sales during the pandemic”.
Like other countries, the beginning of COVID-19 book sellers contributed to change, especially at times when authorities closed all unnecessary businesses to combat the virus.
In the spring, bookstores were “near fall, (but) since summer sales have been satisfactory,” Bahrami at Cheshmeh said.
With the novel “coronavirus, we are basically selling our books through Instagram or websites we have created” specifically, he said, noting that the pandemic “forced us to take online sales more importantly. “