Anyone familiar with postrevolutionary Iranian cinema will have noticed the recurrence of marriages and funerals. In many cases, it is a loved one who is interred, as in a climactic scene in Bahman Farmanara's A Little Kiss when the returning expatriate Saʿdi, played by Reza Kianian, throws himself onto his son's grave. Similarly, Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry ends with a man lying down in his own grave, and in The Wind Will Carry Us, an old woman's burial is deferred because her anticipated death is delayed as she rallies from her terminal illness. With regard to the theme of marriage, Through the Olive Trees, another film by Kiarostami, tells the story of one novice actor's awkward proposal of marriage to his costar, while in more recent cinema—as in the Oscar-winning A Separation—it is the dissolution of a marriage that is explored. But what happens when the line between wedding and funeral, or marriage and death, is blurred, or when the beloved is buried? This question is at the heart of Amy Motlagh's Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. This book explores modern and postmodern Iranian fiction (rather than cinema) together with the legal status of women and specifically of wives. It traces the transformation of the “beloved” of classical Persian poetry into what Motlagh calls the “companionate wife” in both Persian narrative realism and Iranian juridical reform. She shows how the many images of interred lovers and spouses in modern Persian fiction are connected in complex ways to the burial of love's ambiguities under the weight of bureaucratic reforms of the modern nation-state.

It is important at the outset to understand the complexity of the book's title. “Burying the beloved” is a reference to the burial of ambiguity, the obfuscation, even the annihilation, of the polymorphously perverse (or “overdetermined,” as Motlagh puts it) meanings and implications of love, lovers, and beloveds in the Persian poetic tradition. Legal discourse in the modern era (since at least the Mandatory Unveiling Act of 1936), sometimes aided and abetted, and at other times complicated and challenged, by modern realist fiction, aimed at replacing gender's social and cultural ambiguity with a modern bureaucracy and at transforming the complexity of romantic love into legal sexual normativity. Ironically, unveiling the modern woman as companionate wife covered up (or buried) the gendered and sexual ambiguity of the lover/beloved dyad. This modern legal normalization of the heterosexual monogamous nuclear family is a process that was common to the Reza Shah, post-Mossadeq, and post-1979 eras, which in many other ways were at odds with each other. In other words, the pre- and postrevolutionary ideological formations are marked by the continuity of efforts to normalize the meanings of gender, sexuality, and desire through realism. In this sense, Motlagh's work helps complicate the argument for an episodic and discontinuous understanding of modern Iranian literary history to be found in works like Kamran Talattof's The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000). While recognizing the profound ideological breaks (i.e., episodes) between these different political eras in Iranian literary and political history, Motlagh tells the stories of the ongoing movement toward reform in politics and of the evolving forms of narrative realism (including surrealism and “neorealism”) in fiction.

Motlagh's work is compelling and convincing because she avoids simple causal relationships between politics and literature, but instead traces a complex relationship between legal political discourse and literary innovation. Not only is she careful to avoid any causal argument here; she skillfully shows that as discursive formations, law and literature share common underlying motivations, similar parameters, and overlapping concerns. Others have explained the important ways in which social discourse in the public sphere and literary discourse in salons and print media speak to each other, but Motlagh opens up new ways of seeing this well-acknowledged link between belles lettres and politics in modern and contemporary Iranian society. On this score, the later chapters of Burying the Beloved are particularly useful. Here, Motlagh familiarizes us with the public debates that often accompany the publication of contemporary Iranian short stories and novels—from Goli Taraqqi's “The Servant” to Zoya Pirzad's I'll Turn out the Lights, and Fattaneh Hajj Seyyed Javadi's The Morning After. By including a reading of the reception given to these works along with a literary analysis of the works themselves, and then linking these to legal discourse, Motlagh shows convincingly that the public discourse on and around literature is of consequence for civil society, because her fiction has implications that frequently parallel and overlap with the legal discourse of the time.

Along with describing the gradual normalization of marriage, Burying the Beloved tells another compelling story: a tale about modern and contemporary Iranian narrative style and form. Arguably born in the surrealistic dream state of Hedayat's Buf-e Kur, modern Iranian fiction came of age through engagé realism developed by later authors. But despite the seeming conflict between the modernist experimentation of Sadeq Hedayat and the political realism of Simin Daneshvar, these 20th century literary movements shared an underlying tendency towards sociosexual normativity—a modern Iran to which “marriage and heterosexual love were central” (129). Interestingly, it is only in the past twenty years, and after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, that Iranian fiction has shown a vigorous and vital willingness to challenge that normative tendency in interesting ways. Contemporary Iranian writers of fiction subtly challenge the hegemony of the companionate wife and the legal reinvention of marriage. Motlagh offers convincing examples in Pirzad and Javadi, but we might cite others such as Shiva Arastuyi's female characters and narrators in her short story collection, Man Dukhtar Nistam (I Am Not a Girl) (Tehran: Qatreh, 2005). The past twenty years have seen a widespread and public celebration of Iranian cinema's stylistic innovations. For film scholars and fans alike, Iranian cinema has been a revelation. Though she admits to having left out a big part of the story of realism in Iran—namely, cinematic realism—Motlagh nevertheless establishes some important signposts for future studies of realist fiction on the screen. Motlagh's book helps us to see how compelling recent art has been in Iran.

Motlagh's book went to press after 2009, which afforded her the opportunity to make further links between Persian letters and Iranian law, particularly in the context of the Green Movement. In discussing more recent texts such as Shahriar Madanipur's Censoring an Iranian Love Story (and the global response to it) in the wake of the summer of 2009, Motlagh suggests that the struggle over the meanings of love, marriage, and gender in Iranian politics is an ongoing struggle, one waged on the streets of Tehran, but also in the pages of contemporary Iranian novels and short stories. Anglophone readers who have read Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's recently translated The Colonel will find Motlagh's observations suggestively confirmed in the title character's ruminations over killing his wife, and the personal and political conditions under which he must bury his children. Dowlatabadi's novel helps to confirm Motlagh's literary-critical as well as sociopolitical thesis. Motlagh's literary claim shows how the indeterminacy of the figure of the beloved gives way historically to the ideologically ossified image of the companionate wife. This literary-historical argument, then, supports the sociopolitical insight that the legal redefinition of marriage had complex religious, social, and cultural causes. Awareness of such claims about the relationship between legal and literary discourse can help us read Iranian literature in relation to Iranian politics. Motlagh's observations are important for the study of cinema as well, something she herself acknowledges in her concluding remarks where she encourages others to continue where she has left off. Though focused on the literary, her observations about narrative and legal realism have deeply suggestive implications for Iranian film. This reviewer hopes that she finds willing and equally capable interlocutors.