Truth revealed through Romantic language plus modern form

Discussed during the critical session on 'The Wind Carries the Leaves to Valleys

Critics have consensus that 'The Wind Carries the Leaves to Valleys' has strongly portrayed the Sacred Defense incidents in a simple form. The author first draws the audiences from the state of peace to war conditions and attempts to express truth in modern form and romantic language.

IBNA: The critical session on Ali-Allah Salimi's book "The Wind Carries the Leaves to Valleys" was held on Sunday evening at the House of Literati with the presence of Ehsan Abbaslou and Farkhondeh Haqsheno.

At the beginning, Ehsan Abbaslou made a brief review of eight short stories included in the book and added: "Most of these stories deal with war and post-war events. The stories are brief and written in a simple language. The stories draw us from the state of peace to war conditions and then to the present time.

Then Farkhondeh Haqsheno regarded the collection as realistic narrated in Sacred Defense genre and added: "Besides its thematic division into wartime and postwar events, the book is structurally divided into Classical and Neo-Classical styles. As for the classical, one can mention the last story "Tomato Mines Farm" and I believe it is a case of circumlocution, as it is occupied with too many characters and yet narrated in short story form."

She continued: "Each story of 'The Wind Carries leaves to Valleys' is different from others. The overall plot sketches are Carverian, that is, a particular situation is explained in a temporal framework. And still all of them are either classical or neo-classical."

Then referring to the short story 'On the Seagulls' Path' Haqsheno said: "The work is written from a limited omniscient narrator's point of view and approximates neo-classical style in terms of action. Yet the main character of the story or the narrator is never revealed to the reader."

She continued: " 'The Usual Height' is narrated from first person viewpoint. The main subject of the story concerning a combatant who should stay for a long time on an electric post for inspecting the area is a bit far from reality but it is structured well as a work of fiction."

Haqsheno added: "The story has three types of narrative tenses in the present, close past and far past and one of the key features of the story is that it narrates disjunctive pieces without any association of events and it imposes no defect on the format of the story."

Referring to the short story 'Left in the Dust', she said: "The work is realistic and narrated from first person narrator's point of view, but it bypasses the neoclassical form as it does not come to a resolution. Live images are the strong points of this story."

The next speaker, Abbaslou, stated that war may begin with shooting a single bullet but it has no clear end: "For those suffering from the consequences of war, it never comes to an end. War literature has become a literary genre in the world and yet no country has ever seriously dealt with the concept of war – even in the west where only few outstanding books are released. War has many latent aspects that need to come to the focus of the writer and he should learn about every aspect of war if he ever decides to write on the subject."

He added: "Some titles in this story collection include a romantic space but the bitter content is related in simple prose. Such truths could be expressed in a romantic language and the book shows that many settings could be portrayed in modern forms. This has already occurred in this book."

Abbaslou added: "The characters in this book are by no means similar to each other except that they are all set in the eight-year Sacred Defense period. However, the writer should have spent more time on the details of some of these stories' plots."