Dandil is a collection of four stories by the celebrated Iranian author Gholamhossein Saedi, first published 1966. "Saedi's fiction, judging from this uneven sampling of two novellas and three stories, is clearly and inherently political--with impossible-to-miss condemnation of the human waste allowed to have accumulated through the Shah's neglect of Iran's lower classes: benighted, desperately poor, awash in addiction, pimpery, cruelty, and superstition. In ""The Rubbish Heap,"" a hospital serves as cultural nexus of last resort (Saedi is a psychiatrist by training); a young boy is able to learn lessons in hustling there unmatched anywhere else. The strutting administrative class is lampooned in ""Kaykavus, Baldy and Me""--in which a documentary-film crew puts one over on a pompous provincial governor. And in ""Dandil,"" a red-light district pins all its scruffy hopes on a fat American sergeant. Sa'edi resembles certain Russian writers (Voinovich comes to mind) in his ease with the poor and terribly vulgar, but his most interesting work here goes up a few rungs on the class ladder. In ""Calm In the Presence of Others,"" an aging colonel remarried to a younger woman (the age of his grown daughters) goes to pay a visit to those daughters, single young women caught in generational transition between the veil and bewildering independence. The daughters' (and wife's) sociology is interesting, but the portrayal of the increasingly mad colonel is superb: eccentric, sick, molancholy, a comic Lear. Sa'edi's voice, in this piece, proves to be an uncommonly absorbing and skilled one, deserving of a more sustained representation next time around." (Kirkus Review)
About the Author: Gholamhossein Saedi (1936-1985) was a prolific Iranian writer. He has published over forty books, representing his talents in the fiction genres of drama (under the pen name Gohar Morad or Gowhar Murad according to Library of Congress transliteration]), the novel, the screenplay, and the short story in addition to the non-fiction genres of cultural criticism, travel literature and ethnography. Many consider the screenplay for Gav ("The Cow"), Dariush Mehrjui's 1969 film, to be Saedi's magnum opus as it ushered in the New Wave Iranian cinema. After the 1979 revolution and his subsequent exile, he maintained an important figure in the scene of Persian literature despite the Iranian diaspora of which he unwillingly became a part. Till his death in Paris, due to depression and related alcoholism, he remained one of the most prominent and prolific of Iranian writers and intellectuals internationally.