From Isfahan with sorrow

 

  Imagine you're evil.

  Not misunderstood.

  Not sad.

  But evil.

  Imagine you've got a heart that spends all day wanting more.

  Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity.

  Imagine you're like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers.

  Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria.

  Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey.

  Imagine you're evil and you don't do any of those things, but you're like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what's going on and you say nothing's going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English.

  Or imagine you just watch all of this.  And you act like you're disgusted, because you don't like meanness.  But you don't do anything or tell anyone.

  Imagine how much you've got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it.

  Suddenly evil isn't punching people or even hating them.

  Suddenly it's all the stuff you've left undone.

  All the kindness you could have given.

  All the excuses you gave instead.

  Imagine that for a minute.

  Imagine what it means.
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I'm reading Everything Sad is Untrue, by David Nayeri.  A fictionalized memoir by the author, written as though he were still a 12-year-old immigrant from Isfahan, Iran, attending junior high school in Edmond, Oklahoma.

I'm only about one-fifth of the way through.  The story is narrated as the boy's presentation to his class, telling them of his memories of his homeland, but presenting it -- as he clearly states -- sometimes as literal truth, sometimes as myth, and sometimes as historical legend.  He tells it in segments, as Scheherazade told the One Thousand and One Nights, ending each segment with a "cliffhanger."  He is a boy who speaks of the great Persian poets, a boy who begins the book with an epigraph from The Brothers Karamazov.

You might be thinking.  "What kind of twelve-year-old talks like that?"
And I would say, "The kind of twelve-year-old that speaks three languages."

He speaks Farsi, Italian, and English.  Plus a private language he made up when he was younger.

I'll review this book when I finish it.  It's a story of myth, history, geography, and private fantasy -- all used as means to tell a greater truth -- and a memory of how it felt being a sensitive and highly imaginative Iranian child plunked down in the aggressively unimaginative world of an Oklahoma junior high.

Regardless of how the story ends, I know my review will be favorable.