My Uncle Napoleon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My Uncle Napoleon (Persian transliteration: Daei Jaan Napoleon) is a novel, written by Iraj Pezeshkzad, that was published in the early 1970's. A TV series was made based on the novel in 1976. Although the book and the TV series have been banned since the Islamic revolution in 1979, Both the book and the TV series are very popular in Iran.

It was translated to English by Dick Davis.

The Publishers describe the novel thus:

"Set in a garden in Tehran in the early 1940s, where three families live under the tyranny of a paranoid patriarch, My Uncle Napoleon is a rich, comic and brilliantly on-target send-up of Iranian society. The novel is, at its core, a love story. But the young narrator's delicate and pure love for his cousin Layli is constantly jeopardized by an unforgettable cast of family members and the hilarious mayhem of their intrigues and machinations. It is also a social satire, a lampooning of the widespread Iranian belief that foreigners (particularly the British) are responsible for events that occur in Iran. But most of all it is a very enjoyable, often side-splitting read that you wish did not have to end. First published in Iran in the early 1970s, the novel became an all-time best-seller. In 1976 it was turned into a television series and immediately captured the imagination of the whole nation - its story became a cultural reference point and its characters national icon! Dick Davis' superb English translation has not only captured the uproarious humor of the original but has also caught the delicate, underlying vibrancy of the Persian."