Reviewed by Bob Williams

Aria
by Nassim Assefi
Harcourt
2007, ISBN 978-0-15-101293-0, $23.00, 258 pages

Nassim Assefi, American of Iranian parents, has a background in medicine and social work. This is her first novel.

The controlling occurrence of Aria is the death of a child. This is a bold choice. No event can be worse for a parent than the death of a child. The choices for an author who sets such a theme before her readers are few. It would be hard to avoid a book that did not sink into sentimentality. Assefi has avoided this without the contrary fault of placing the story into an impersonal and cold narrative.

The dead child is Aria. She is five years old and is struck down while at play by a teenage driver whose culpability is not fully determined. Jasmine, Aria’s single mother, is consumed with grief. Her father had disowned her for her relationship with Justin, Aria’s father, who had died prior to his planned marriage to Jasmine.

This is an epistolary novel basically although there are other documents introduced that are not, strictly speaking, letters. There is, for example, the narrative of the accident submitted by the driver as a class assignment many years after the accident. The order of the material presented is – with some exceptions – chronological.

Jasmine copes with her grief in two ways. She writes letters to her dead loved ones: Justin, Aria, and her grandmother. And she travels. She leaves her position as oncologist at a Seattle hospital and goes first to Guatemala where Justin served in the Peace Corps. She next goes to Tibet where she lives among nuns at a Buddhist nunnery in Lhasa. She finds little to assuage her grief in either but time has begun to subdue its violence. She only finds the beginning of resolution when she leaves Tibet for Iran and reconciliation with her parents.

This is complicated by the bitterness of memories both on her part and on that of her mother. But she finds that her mother is the talented repository of family stories, especially those concerning her Jasmine’s beloved grandmother. They reach a qualified understanding which both are wise enough to accept as adequate.

The other characters who people the story are sharply drawn. There is Alexander, a somewhat unstable would-be lover of Jasmine and Jasmine’s dwarf friend Dot.

There is much of talent in this remarkable book. It is a serious meditation on the greatest misfortune in life and an interesting display of the growth of the persons involved. It gains a certain topicality in the abundance of material from a part of the world little known or understood. Thus Aria stands out as notable achievement and should appeal to many discriminating readers.



About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His writings, two books and a number of short articles on Joyce, can be accessed at: http://www.grand-teton.com/service/Persons_Places

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