In his travelogue-cum-history, Jubber (The Prester Quest
) recounts his journey into the heart of contemporary Persian culture with the 11th-century poetic epic, Shahnameh
(“The Book of Kings”), as his Rosetta stone. Traveling through Iran, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, the author finds that the book is “a living, breathing entity; the most accurate account available of the psyche of the Persian-speaking people”; its myths, heroes, and villains are daily cultural touch points, from dinnertime conversation to pop song lyrics, in village butcher shops and on city stages. As Jubber becomes better acquainted with the Shahnameh
, he comes to see that “the best way of getting to grips with this strange, secretive [region] might be through the unlikely binoculars of a thousand-year-old epic,” and he uses the epic to scaffold his own discoveries. By book's end, having moved from North Tehran villas to rickety Afghan buses, and having encountered kindness and brutality, technological savvy and vestiges of medievalism, Jubber's account offers a full and satisfying panorama of the region with its rich paradoxes and complexities intact. (May)
