The Stationery Shop
By Marjan Kamali
Publication Year: 2019
Type: Fiction
Genre: romance, historical fiction
Read on 2019-08-21
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2019 Reading Survey ➞
★★☆☆☆
TLDR: If you’re into romantic tropes, historical fiction, plot spanning an entire lifetime, and epistolary writing, you might be into this. Do not expect much by way of Iranian history, realism, suspense, dialogue, or character development.
Reading this book gave me the opportunity to think more deeply about why I don’t tend to like historical fiction. Contemporary settings are oftentimes the author’s and reader’s lived realities and therefore intimately familiar to both in a way that a historical context can never be. This frees up the writer to more lyricism in their writing and the reader to more lyricism in their interpretation. A lot of historical fiction gets bogged down in relaying historical events and lose that lyrical, literary quality. The history bits end up feeling like some forced cheesy pedagogical exercise with pale characters and writing.
So this book follows the life of Roya as she meetcutes activist Bahman in a stationary shop in Tehran, Iran in 1953. After they get separated, we follow her to school in the U.S., and her life thereafter. The conceit of the plot is just paper thin, you can pretty much guess every twist. Building suspense/mystery is really not this author’s strong suit. Romantic tropes and deus ex machina galore. I liked the epistolary chapters in the middle but didn’t like that the big payoff chapter at the end was entirely epistolary. Too much telling. The stationary shop really didn’t end up figuring much in the story at all - by which I mean it danced in and out but you could’ve replaced the words stationary shop with coffee shop, noodle place, laundromat - anything else and it wouldn’t have changed the story one bit. As a stationary geek I was not satisfied. Not enough stationary porn! Not enough literary geekiness!
Roya frustratingly lacks agency or character traits, doesn’t make any decisions, doesn’t appear to think about anything or have any kind of inner world, only ever reacts to external events or follows instructions of others. Allegedly loves reading and had an unconventional upbringing as a girl in mid-century Tehran but we don’t really see that play out against her peers or the rest of society - she never mentions reading or thinking about poetry/books/heroines/characters/philosophies past the meetcute. No chemistry between romantic leads - meetcute is cute but we’re just kind of told they love each other now, in spite of the fact that Roya is really against Bahman’s political activism which is kind of his defining character trait/core beliefs so why did she??? Like him??????
Young Mr. Fakhri and melon girl was super rape-y, the writing here also literally compares her to a melon to be bought and consumed. He kept describing her as sweet and sticky and it felt really gross given their diegetic power imbalance. This does get kind of resolved later but not handled very well. In a similar vein, Bahman’s mom’s character was handled EXCEEDINGLY POORLY. She suffers from depression and seemingly mania and personality disorder or something, but her characterization is bizarrely like something out of a Gothic English novel, like she’s basically Mr. Rochester’s mad wife Bertha they try to hide in the attic and who acts erratically and feels sort of demonic.
Halfway through you’re like ok how much more plot could there possibly be left to fill the next half - and indeed, the middle of the book is pretty much useless. Roya continues not to develop as a character (a tragedy happens to her and she is sad but that’s not really meaningfully separated from her #sad feelings about Bahman so it didn’t really feel like it added anything to her #sad character). There is a random chapter dedicated to the backstory of Claire the senior centre staff member that goes no where. Walter and Zari also stay mostly the same. There is like a one page arc for Patricia and her relationship with Roya that is genuinely moving but is over so quick you’d blink and miss it.
People whose stories seem more interesting than Roya’s and are CERTAINLY more interesting than Claire’s: Jahangir, melon girl’s life after Mr. Fakhri, Mr. Fakhri, Bahman’s life after 1953.
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