The Prince (Paperback)

A groundbreaking novel when first published in Iran in 1969, for its use of the modern literary style to depict the demise of the Iranian aristocracy.
It is mid-1920s Iran. In a crumbling house in a provincial town, the last survivor of a deposed dynasty is slowly dying from tuberculosis. The old prince's domain has been reduced to his domestic household, where the former glories of his ancestors haunt him. Drifting in and out of reality, the prince re-lives episodes of his forebears' exulted and often brutal past; a macabre time of public despotism when men were put to death by being sheathed in plaster, and when a child might be beheaded as punishment for poor schoolwork. Long-dead relatives threaten menacingly from photographs the old prince surrounds himself with; damaged images fleetingly brought to life by a fractured hallucinatory mind, only to fade away as another vestige from the past rattles in its picture frame.
When the novel was first published in Iran in 1969 (as Prince Ehtejab), Golshiri was acclaimed as one of the first writers to apply modern literary techniques to depict the demise of the Iranian aristocracy.