Iraj Pezeshkzad, Author of a Classic Iranian Novel, Dies at 94 (original) (raw)

Middle East|Iraj Pezeshkzad, Author of a Classic Iranian Novel, Dies at 94

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/world/middleeast/iraj-pezeshkzad-dead.html

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The satirical “My Uncle Napoleon” became a cultural touchstone that held up a mirror to his country, before the 1979 revolution sent the author into exile in Paris.

Iraj Pezeshkzad as a child, left, with his sister and their uncle, who was the inspiration for “My Uncle Napoleon.”Credit...via Pezeshkzad family

Published Feb. 23, 2022Updated Feb. 25, 2022

Iraj Pezeshkzad, a prominent writer and satirist who became a cultural figure after his blockbuster novel, “My Uncle Napoleon,” captured the imaginations of generations of Iranians, died on Jan. 12 in Los Angeles. He was 94.

Mr. Pezeshkzad (pronounced pez-ESHK-zaad) died of cardiac arrest in his sleep, according to his son and sole survivor, Bahman Pezeshkzad, an artist who lives in Paris.

The elder Mr. Pezeshkzad had been visiting friends in Los Angeles at the start of the coronavirus pandemic and decided to stay in California to avoid the risk of travel back to Paris, where he had been living since the end of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Despite being in exile for four decades, Mr. Pezeshkzad was one of Iran’s best-selling authors and most prolific satirists. He wrote 17 satirical novels and more than a dozen scholarly books and essays on history and literature.

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Mr. Pezeshkzad in 2019. Throughout his years of exile he dreamed of returning to Iran but never did.Credit...via Pezeshkzad family

He was best known for “My Uncle Napoleon” (1970), the story of an aristocratic family living in Iran in the 1940s as the country was modernizing. The patriarch briefly served in the military but, with delusions of grandeur, compares himself to Napoleon, making up stories about battles he led with the British Army to liberate Iran and sharing conspiracy theories about the British. His servant and sidekick, Mash Ghasem, one of the most beloved characters in the book, feeds these fantasies with laugh-out-loud humor.

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