THE STATIONERY SHOP: BOOK REVIEW
“Roya’s Mother had always said that our fate is written on our foreheads when we’re born. It can’t be seen, can’t be read, but it’s there all right, and life follows that fate. No matter what.”
Life is like a maze. It takes mysterious twists and turns, has walls much too tall to peer over, and often includes a few dead ends. When we’re in the maze, we do not know where we are going next, nor where it ends. But, when we overcome the pressures of giving up, we often find that our path, full of seemingly impossible challenges, eventually leads us to restore what we once thought was lost.
Marjan Kamali’s The Stationery Shop focuses on the timeless enigma of fate and destiny through the love story of protagonists Roya Joon and Bahman Aslan. In this captivating novel, Kamali discusses timeless themes that continue to weigh on us all. The novel takes place over nearly an entire century to capture the generational struggles of classism, misogyny, gender inequality, grief, immigration, and political unrest. The Stationery Shop is primarily written from a third-person perspective based on Roya’s point of view. However, Kamali structures the novel to include chapters that flash forward and backward in time to provide a multi-generational look into the lives of the other characters. This is one of my favorite elements of the novel’s form, as it creates exceptional foreshadowing and dramatic irony which adds to the prismatic nature of the tale.
Roya and Bahman are from Tehran, Iran. The two fall in love in the year leading up to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. Roya is a seventeen-year-old girl from a humble working-class family of four. Bahman, an avid pro-Mossadegh political activist, is son to an engineer and a mentally unstable mother. When the two meet at their local Stationery Shop, brought together by the store-keeper’s match-making skills and a shared love for Persian poetry, their souls become eternally intertwined and their lives change forever.
One day, after promising to meet Roya at the city square, Bahman disappears. He never returns. Devastated by the alleged abandonment and the aftermath of the coup d’etat, Roya leaves the city that she once called home and emigrates to the United States with her sister. The rest of the novel follows Roya’s post-Bahman destiny.
The Stationery Shop progresses like movements in a ballet. Each transition advances through a sophisticated waltz of emotion. The Stationery Shop gracefully emerges from a playful teen romance to a thought-provoking tale that surpasses the boundaries of time. Kamali emphasizes the power of true love through the novel’s protagonists, as their love shatters traditional cultural customs, tears open generational wounds, exposes the intricacies of classism, and emphasizes the evil power behind deception and hatred that threatens to drive us all too close to death. Though I’ve never experienced true love, I feel the love between Roya and Bahman radiating from the page and seeping into my pores. I feel Roya’s young-love butterflies in my stomach and find myself smiling uncontrollably. Even as the plot twists and Roya’s life moves on, I still feel her continual sorrow, wonder, loss, and longing.
However, The Stationery Shop is not only a story about young love. Pervasive themes of feminism, sisterhood, and motherhood are interwoven throughout. Kamali addresses the role of women in both Iran and the United States over nine decades. She sheds light on cultural shame, gender inequality, immigration, and race, and how these issues have both stayed the same and evolved over time. However, one of the most grounding relationships between women in The Stationary Shop occur through sisterhood. Roya and her sister Zari have a beautiful and dynamic relationship that withstands fate’s crashing waves and unpredictable undertow. I find Kamali’s development of this relationship both comforting and humorous because it is remarkably familiar to my relationship with my sisters. While Zari is the realist, her sister is the lovesick idealist. When Roya’s heart is overflowing with young love, Zari is the one to remove her sister’s rose-colored glasses. Yet, when Roya’s world turns upside down after Bahman’s abandonment, Zari is there to comfort her.
While Kamali celebrates the power of motherhood, she vividly illustrates the reality behind the unbearable grief of losing a child. Modern-day society glamorizes childbearing, birth, and infancy, but very rarely dares to utter the haunting possibility of tragedy. The novel exposes false comfort and emphasizes how much we take the gift of life for granted. Initially, I was slightly caught off guard, but now, I am devastatingly aware of the realities of such fates.
Through The Stationery Shop, Marjan Kamali inspires us to explore the beautiful mystery of our fate. Roya Joon and Bahman Aslan remind us that our futures are not necessarily our own, and that true love prevails over the barriers of time, space, and social class.