A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea
Dina Nayeri, 2013
Penguing Group USA
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487040
Summary
Growing up in a small rice-farming village in 1980s Iran, eleven-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister, Mahtab, are captivated by America. They keep lists of English words and collect illegal Life magazines, television shows, and rock music.
So when her mother and sister disappear, leaving Saba and her father alone in Iran, Saba is certain that they have moved to America without her. But her parents have taught her that “all fate is written in the blood,” and that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea.
As she grows up in the warmth and community of her local village, falls in and out of love, and struggles with the limited possibilities in post-revolutionary Iran, Saba envisions that there is another way for her story to unfold. Somewhere, it must be that her sister is living the Western version of this life. And where Saba’s world has all the grit and brutality of real life under the new Islamic regime, her sister’s experience gives her a freedom and control that Saba can only dream of.
Filled with a colorful cast of characters and presented in a bewitching voice that mingles the rhythms of Eastern storytelling with modern Western prose, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is a tale about memory and the importance of controlling one’s own fate. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979
• Where—Iran
• Raised—Oklahoma, USA
• Education—B.A. Princeton University; M.B.A., M.Ed.,
Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Iowa City, Iowa (the Iowa Writers'
Workshop)
Dina Nayeri was born in the middle of a revolution in Iran and moved to Oklahoma at ten-years-old. Her debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, was released in 2013 by Riverhead Books (Penguin), translated to 13 foreign languages, and selected as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers book. Her work is published or scheduled for publication in over 20 countries and has appeared in Granta New Voices, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salon, Glamour, and elsewhere. She holds an MBA and a Master of Education, both from Harvard, and a BA from Princeton. She has worked in high fashion, management consulting, university admissions, investment banking, and once as a grumpy lifeguard. Now Dina is at work on her second novel (also about an Iranian family) at the Iowa Writers Workshop where she is a Truman Capote Fellow and Teaching Writing Fellow (Fom the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Lovely.
Vanity Fair
A feel-good family tale.
Cosmopolitan
This ambitious novel set in northern Iran in the decade after the 1979 revolution contains not a teaspoon but a ton of history, imagination, and longing. Beginning with the 1981 disappearance of 11-year-old Saba Hafezi’s twin sister, Mahtab, and their mother, Khanom, Nayeri interweaves Saba’s family trauma as seen through the eyes of the women of her seaside village, along with fantasies about Mahtab’s teenage fascination with everything American, shared by her friends Reza and Ponneh. Saba loves Reza, but allows herself to be married off to old Abbas Hossein Abbas, expecting to eventually gain freedom by becoming a rich widow. The characters’ dreams are shattered, however, amid rising violence, as beautiful Ponneh is beaten for wearing red high-heels, Saba is violently attacked by two chador-clad women working for her husband and the new regime, and another woman is hanged for defying the new Islamic norms. Saba’s first tentative protests give way to more drastic decisions as the realities of postrevolution Iran and the truth about her mother and sister sink in. Nayeri crams so much into her story, especially Saba’s distracting fiction of her sister’s life in the United States, that her lyrical evocation of a vanishing Iran gets lost in an irritating narrative tangle.
Publishers Weekly
Nayeri’s highly accomplished debut is a rich, multilayered reading experience. Structurally complex, the overriding theme is storytelling in all its forms, and the fine line between truth and lies. Each one of the large cast of characters is fully realized and sympathetic. Saba is a captivating heroine whose tragedies and triumphs will carry readers on a long but engrossing ride..
Library Journal
Elegant aspirational novel of life in post-revolutionary Iran.... Twin sisters Saba and Mahtab Hafezi live at the end of the universe--or, more specifically, in a tiny rice-farming village deep in the Iranian interior, having moved from Tehran to escape the eyes and hands of the mullahs and revolutionary guards.... [I]n Nayeri's (Another Jekyll, Another Hyde, 2012, etc.) richly imaginative chronicle, everyone dreams there, not least Saba, whose expectations crumble in the face of a reality for which she's not prepared.... It takes a village full of sometimes odd, sometimes ordinary people to afford Saba the wherewithal to realize her dreams, which take her far, far from there. Lyrical, humane and hopeful; a welcome view of the complexities of small-town life, in this case in a place that inspires fear instead of sympathy.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Saba invents a life for Mahtab that parallels her own. How or why does she choose these particular scenes or moments of Mahtab’s life to imagine? How do the stakes of Mahtab’s decisions change over the course of the book as Saba herself grows up and her own desires evolve?
2. “The beauty of being Mahtab is that you need no partner at all,” Saba tells Khanom Omidi in one of her descriptions of her sister’s American life. Why is this idea so beautiful to Saba? How does it foreshadow the decisions she will make later in her own life?
3. In what ways is A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea a story about storytelling? What are some important narratives that the characters create for one another, or for themselves? What are the effects of these stories in the novel as a whole?
4. The stories told by the characters do not necessarily have to be the truth in order to be honest. What kinds of untruths are told in this book? How are they positive? How are they negative?
5. Talk about the book’s four first-person narrators: Khanom Basir, Khanom Mansoori, Khanom Omidi, and Dr. Zohreh. How do these women’s perspectives change your understanding of Saba’s life story, especially the disappearance of her mother and sister? Why are their insights important?
6. Discuss the status of women in this book. In what ways are they oppressed and mistreated? In what ways are they revered and powerful? How do Saba and Ponneh deal with these tensions? In this society, how is it meaningful that Saba grew up with a father but no mother?
7. Khanom Basir constantly criticizes the way Saba’s mother raised her and Mahtab before her disappearance. From what you know of Maman, do you agree with Khanom Basir? Did Maman’s boldness make her a bad mother? Did she put her daughters in jeopardy, or did she teach them how to be independent women? Khanom Basir says, “God will never forgive Bahareh for her impractical ways, for teaching her daughter to search for meaning in illegal nothings.” Did this lesson in fact ruin Saba’s life, or did it save it?
8. “Good-byes are such luxuries,” Khanom Basir says. Which is worse for Saba: the loss of her family, or the uncertainty surrounding it?
9. How does Ponneh’s guilt about Farnaz’s execution resemble Saba’s guilt about Mahtab’s drowning?
10. After harboring so much hatred for him, why does Saba ultimately feel so bad letting Abbas die?
11. Saba wants her freedom, but what exactly is she longing to be free from? Her past? The inevitable consequences of a future in Iran? Longing itself? Discuss.
(Questions from the author's website.)