9 - Making Sense of the Senses : A Sensory Reading of Moniro Ravanipour’s These Crazy Nights

Summary

Among contemporary Iranian writers of fiction, Moniro Ravanipour can be described as an author whose work is to some extent autobiographical and based on her memories of personal experiences, and also as a writer who usually writes by inspiration and instinct, rather than by way of intellection and emphasis on technique. This characterization can be seen in not only her early work, such as her first novel published in 1989, Ahl-e Gharq (translated into English as The Drowned), but all the way through to her latest novel published in 2017, Shab-ha-ye Shurangiz (translated into English as These Crazy Nights). The main difference is that while her earlier stories, which were published in Iran under the watchful eyes of the censors of the Islamic Republic, are to some degree restrained in terms of open expression of sentiments and sensations, especially pertaining to physical interaction between the opposite sexes, her latest work, published outside Iran and without government- or self-imposed restraints, displays a remarkable openness in the sensory expression of such sentiments. In this chapter I offer a sensory reading of These Crazy Nights to show the extent to which Ravanipour's narrative depends on the five basic senses.

As I begin rereading These Crazy Nights, I call to mind Mehdi Khorrami's notion of the ‘building blocks’ of sensory reading.2 Hence, I intend to neither theorize, nor make references to related theories, nor read anything other than the novel itself. I will try to grope my way through the text, allowing my senses, rather than my mind, to read, or rather to feel, the novel. My assumption is that the result will be some sort of explication de texte from a sensory perspective.

Based on the author's designation, above I used the word ‘novel’ to describe These Crazy Nights, but considering that the original Persian is merely 132 pages long and the English translation is less than 36,000 words, the term ‘novella’ might be more appropriate. On the other hand, the book consists of eight chapters, each of which is called an ‘act’. In fact, many references are made to plays and theater throughout this short novella.