City of Tower and Fog

It is customary to read the first book of any young writer, whether it is a collection of short stories or a novel, with sympathy and to overlook its weaknesses, focusing more on its strengths to ultimately say: this writer will prove to be capable in future works. However, there is essentially no need for such half-hearted flattery regarding Arman Salehi’s first collection of short stories, titled “City of Tower and Fog,” published by Afraz Publishing. The issue is not whether he is already a capable writer or will likely become one in the future. Beyond all that, the feeling from reading this collection once is that you are dealing with a genuine writer. In other words, Salehi has shown in this collection that he is able to create his own fictional world, a world he knows every detail of, and in every line of his stories, he strives to build upon the bricks of that world. “City of Tower and Fog” is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, the stories “City of Tower and Fog,” “Number Play,” and “The Superfluous Storyteller” revolve around the theme of obsession; in the second chapter, the stories “I-S-O-L-A-T-I-O-N Has No Parts,” “Night Vehicles,” “Night Documents,” and “Mud” contain motifs of humiliation; the third chapter is dedicated to an essay on the form of the short story collection in our fiction literature. However, in all three chapters, traces of the narrator’s obsession, humiliated people and objects, and a type of analytical, insightful, and detailed perspective can be seen. The explanations Salehi provides at the beginning of each chapter, as well as the final chapter of the book, indicate that he is not the kind of writer who only writes his story and once it is finished, feels relieved; rather, it seems he lingers so much over every word that he continues writing even after the story’s end. Usually, in such cases, one wonders which direction the young writer will take in future stories, but Salehi has taken such a firm and significant step in this first book that the question should be asked differently: can we follow a path that leads to the newly discovered world Salehi has created? Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the story “Mud”: “The story begins like this. On an autumn or spring evening or something similar, someone important to you calls you mud. Calls you worthless and insignificant. And you try to think you’re mud only to them. It doesn’t matter. Only to a human being, worthless and mud. It is a usual event. But because this person is important to you, you try to convince them that you are not mud. Strange reactions, strange words, untimely silences.”