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.
