Coming in Q1 2027 · the second New Naqqali world

The Blind Owlبوف کور

The Blind Owl (Būf-e Kūr) is Sadegh Hedayat’s landmark Gothic novella of 1936–37, celebrated as a foundational work of modern Iranian literature.

Sadegh HedayatAuthor, 1903–1951

1936, BombayFirst published in India, later circulated widely and translated into many languages

NovellaFragmented, surreal, stream-of-consciousness and dreamlike

The story

A tale told to a shadow

An unnamed, opium-addicted painter of pen-case covers, living in self-imposed exile, tells a hallucinatory, cyclical story to his own shadow. It turns on an obsessive, fatal fixation on a mysterious woman, the murder and dismemberment of his unfaithful wife, and a deep psychological descent into madness.

Themes and motifs

What returns, and why

Existential alienationIsolation, absurdity and dread, written before much of Western mid-century existentialism.

Symbols that recurAn old man with a chilling laugh, four cadaverous black horses, a bone-handled knife, a cypress tree, an urn of poisoned wine.

Many influencesWestern modernist and surrealist technique blended with Sufi mysticism, Buddhism, and Indian and Persian philosophy.

ReceptionOften compared to the psychological horror of Poe and Kafka; its bleak political and cultural undertones led to periods of being banned in Iran.

Coming

The New Naqqali treatment

Where the Shahnameh is vast, The Blind Owl is dense: the same faces, objects and places come back, changed, as the narrator’s world folds in on itself. That is exactly what a structured world can illuminate, with every recurring image and every figure who may be another figure in disguise traced from one half of the book to the other.

Built with GNML, the same structure behind our Shahnameh: the text with an address for every line, a registry of its people, places and recurring objects, and the layers that attach to them.

We will open this world in the first quarter of 2027. To hear when it does, write to Editor@newnaqqali.com.

Meanwhile, enter the Shahnameh