Tehran, Lipstick and Loopholes
It seemed like such a simple thing. The author, an Iranian living in Paris, had returned to Tehran for a holiday. Now she’s ready to go home; she just needs to renew her Iranian passport, a process that is usually fairly routine. Told over the space of slightly more than a week, the story recounts Tajadod’s rather mind-bogglingly circuitous odyssey to get the paperwork done. Tajadod structures the book like a novel, introducing us to a number of peculiar and interesting characters (who are, we must assume, more or less as they actually are), telling us the story of a hapless traveler simply trying to get home. Adroitly translated from the original French, the book offers readers a detailed and fascinating look at daily life in Tehran—a place that, despite our Western sense of its radical difference, seems quite familiar in many ways. It’s not really a travel memoir; more of an I-want-to-travel memoir. --David Pitt--This text refers to an alternatePaperbackedition.