Garden of the Brave in War, by Terence O’Donnell

If a sojourn in Iran were not already near the top of my wish list, O’Donnell’s 1980 memoir would have put it there. But his expressed desire to preserve “certain features of the traditional life” speaks to the fact that a twenty-first century visit would reveal a far different outlook than the one inscribed here. Though the era in question is pre-revolutionary, O’Donnell believed the onward march of technology (“the transistor radio and the motorbike”), more than the Islamic revolution, would change the cultural landscape. No doubt he is right. What did he know then of the internet and cell phones?

O’Donnell’s account is formed from the journal he kept while farming for nearly a decade in 1960s southwest Iran. That such a life was at one time possible for an American (a fellow Oregonian, no less) is almost incomprehensible now. O’Donnell writes beguilingly of the workings of his farm and orchard, his travels through the countryside, his interactions (often patronizing) with his man-of-all-work Mohammad Ali, and the various institutions and individuals that populated the region–doctors, princes, landowners, jesters.

But in asking whether the Iran O’Donnell writes of still exists, one must ask–did it ever? As we all must, and as O’Donnell himself acknowledges, he writes the world as he sees it, through the lens of an American trying to make sense of his experiences, generalizing as he feels warranted, rendering it all in his mid-twentieth-century English idiom. Processing his accounts requires a certain suspension of belief, keeping in mind that this is one man’s perspective on his personal experience in a very particular time and place.

Section titles like “The Hunting Expedition” or “The Winter Village” alternate with others titled “Journal I,” “Journal II,” and so forth. The narratives, some taken verbatim from journal entries, offer little in the way of plot or character development. But colorfully drawn personalities and picturesque–often poetic–descriptions keep the reader fully engaged.

At times O’Donnell writes with acute self-awareness and perception. Of the differences in perspective between himself and Mohammad Ali, he observes:

“He brought to the farm three things which were strange to me: his concept of the natural world, his belief that God lives down among us, and his idea of how people should live together. His natural world contained many more wonders than my own and was a far more interesting, if peculiar, place.” (p. 41)

At other times–and sometimes simultaneously–O’Donnell verges into romanticism. But a certain amount of romance may be inevitable when reminiscing on a place where one has invested a considerable sum of years.

No doubt the timing of publication contributed to O’Donnell’s nostalgia and the sense of loss that tinges his narrative at points. It may not be worth speculating as to whether the world O’Donnell sketches still exists, or ever did for anyone other than himself; it is certainly beyond my capacity to find out. But it is well worth spending time in the pages of his book.