From ash and smoke

With his novel Ashes and Smoke, Blasband fascinated readers as much as critics (the book received a Rossel Prize). The story, interwoven with autobiographical elements, captures the memories of young Irja Lévy, who had to flee his homeland, Iran, with his family during the Islamic Revolution. She tells the story of her mother’s family, the Hosseinik family, the life of her Argentine Jewish father, Cendres ’painful love for a young prostitute, her stay in Israel. The two main motifs of the novel are the rootlessness of the characters and the tragic vision of love. Iraq has lost its identity but is unable to adapt to the lifestyles of the citizens of the host country. Irja’s mother can’t become a successful business woman, her father flees into alcohol, and his brother Maurice believes he can find himself in the craft of male prostitution. Not only did Iraj’s love for Cendres remain unrequited: his uncle, Bizsan, hopelessly in love with his niece, Omideh, looked at the sun until he became blind. New Hosseini's marriages ended in divorce. The novel contains extremely deep feelings and thoughts. The episodes referring to the first part of the title (ashes) are the poisoning and cremation of Maurice by a jealous lover, the hot passion that bound Iraqi to Cendres, and then the young man’s journey to Israel with an urn containing his brother’s ashes describes unrequited love and death. Iraj does not want to let the past turn into smoke, he wants to write his memoirs. But his attempt is doomed, writing is incapable of giving life to the past, on the contrary: Every word destroys the memory it describes. The sentences erase my childhood. Writing makes it impossible for him to be who he was again. But from his words a world is born, even if it consists of ashes and smoke.