You needn’t read very far to find the theme of A Nearby Country Called Love — or one of them, at least. Salar Abdoh’s latest novel tips its hand almost immediately. A man named Nasser claims a distant kinship to a woman who set herself on fire after her husband took a second wife. Nasser, a firefighter with a reputation as a man of effective violence in Zamzam, a tough part of Tehran, wants to avenge the woman’s honor by fighting her widower. He enlists his friend Issa, who is considerably less enthusiastic.

As they square off for the fight, Issa suddenly feels the hopeless audacity of it all. “A woman had burned herself and they were going through the ritual of supposedly doing something about it. Yet it had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with them, here, proving their prickly little manhoods. At that moment, it felt like Nasser and he were even bigger frauds than the fraudulent widower.”

Violence is the grammar of masculinity in Zamzam, where Issa grew up, and Issa is capable of a fight. He spent his childhood up in his father’s dojo, practicing karate for hours. And he finds himself frequently on the cusp of a fight — a fight that, like the one for the immolated woman’s honor, he never really sees through.

No wonder: In just the first few pages of the novel, as Issa stands next to the blustering Nasser, he realizes that his violence won’t help him understand what drove her to hers. He turns instead to books — to a cherished library left behind by his late brother — and to a cast of characters who unexpectedly return to his life. It is a life made even more complicated by the ten years he spent in the United States, a memory that sometimes reasserts itself in his private biography, “a little piece of information he carried inside him like a lifejacket.”

Events reconnect Issa to his mother of sorts, a Turkish woman named Aziz who cooked and cleaned for Issa’s widowed father, and Aziz’s daughter, Solmaz, who became a doctor despite the patriarchal strictures of her country; to Jafar, who’d served in the Revolutionary Guard and fought in Afghanistan, a path Issa had once hoped to emulate; and to Mehran, a young gay man who had been friends with Issa’s brother, Hashem, and the community of queer theater performers that Mehran reconnects Issa with.

Then there is Nasser, whose fear of his growing love for another man comes out as rage against him, and there is Issa’s brother, Hashem, or Issa’s memory of him. Hashem suffered brutally as the queer eldest son of a man who made a living, as a martial arts master and teacher, from the twinning of violence and masculinity. Hashem both mesmerized and mystified Issa, who wandered into Hashem’s world often enough that his friends remembered Issa, but never long enough for Issa to understand who they really were.

In the days since he’s returned to Iran, Abdoh writes, Issa finds that “naiveté rubbed him the wrong way, especially his own.” And so leaves the unconsummated fight determined to understand not only why women in Iran feel they must burn themselves — and which sons-of-bitches make them feel this way — but also to understand the lives of these friends, all of whom are trying to find their way through a rapidly changing Iran.

From the very beginning of the book, Issa is also looking for love. He falls for a woman who translates Arabic poetry, and whom he knows only by correspondence, but their affair is stymied. She sends him looking for her in Beirut, though she lives in the Arab province of southwestern Iran; when they finally do meet, he sees that she’s unexpectedly young, and he backs away. Then she falls in love with Mehran’s roommate, a trans man.

Issa and Solmaz, whose separation from her husband has cost her visiting rights to her child, try, very briefly, to offer each other sexual pleasure. Issa turns to Mehran, from whom he finds tenderness and appreciation but not the love he’s been seeking. In romance, as in violence, Issa remains unconsummated.

The novel ends with a visit from Issa’s friend Babacar, a towering Senegalese autodidact whom he befriended when they both worked nights at a hotel in New York City. Babacar’s return home was perceived as a shame and a failure, and he wants to get out. Issa misses his friend but believes that nowhere is more or less shit than home; it is merely different. He tells him not to come, but Babacar arrives anyway. With the long years of life in New York shared between them, Issa relaxes, for the first time really, into friendship. The love that he seeks, the love that he needs, is not the kind carved by the contours of his culture, neither the one he grew up in nor the one Mehran brings him back to.

Before that, Issa returns to his family’s ancestral village, where a teenage girl set herself on fire, it was said, because she was not allowed to go to school. Issa wants to confront her father, but he does not find a misogynistic villain worthy of confronting. There is only a distraught and grieving parent, a poor man who only wanted his daughter to wait another year so that he could pay her school fees. It is a truth that affects him more profoundly than the outrage that began the journey.

And that, too, is how Abdoh’s novel works. It will probably be read as a queer novel, or perhaps as a gender novel, as Iran’s LGBTQIA+ novel or as a searing work on women’s rights in an Islamic Republic. It will probably read, that is, as some sort of sweeping novel. In some ways, it rightfully and needfully is. But it complicates all of those things — or rather, our expectations of those things — and offers, in their place, so many beautiful, complex, heartbreaking, human moments that we, too, might carry like a life jacket.

—Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

Guernica: How did this book take hold of you?

Abdoh: I always had an idea deep in the back of my head that I would do a book that dealt in some fashion with the relationship of my father and my older brother. My father was not just a typical macho Middle Eastern man — he was the prototype of a macho man. He’d been a boxer; he started a professional soccer team in Iran. He was a kind man, and he was a very violent man. And then there was my brother, who was gay and who went on to become a very famous international theater artist and then died very early.

Guernica: And like Issa, you yourself were quite a serious martial artist, no?

Abdoh: Yes, by the time I went to college, I was practicing karate eight hours a day. I thought I was going to be a martial artist for the rest of my life. So for much of my life there’s been these two sides of me.

And I’ve always known I would write this book one day, but then several things happened in the last few years. I’d spent almost half a decade going in and out of the trenches of the war in Iraq-Syria, out of which came my last book, Out of Mesopotamia. And once Covid came, I was just sort of sitting around with nothing to do, but I had these two Persian essays of mine, published first in Iran, in the back of my mind — one about my brother and one about my relationship to the martial arts — and so I just started to write. I had been thinking I would write this book years from now, when I was older and more mature I guess. When I did start writing, what was more on my mind was what women in Iran were going through. This was maybe two years before the women’s movement. I was thinking: Why do women in this country, and in other countries, self-immolate? What is the super-structure that allows these things to happen?

Guernica: Issa sets off with that question too — partly because, when he gets home, and he realizes he’s unprepared to be Iranian again. Let me just pull from your book: “He’d foolishly followed news of home through sweeping canvases that always had to do with wars and revolutions in the Middle East. No one here really gave a fuck about revolution or war. Those things, he’d come to find out abroad, were only for academics and ax-to-grind exiles who never got tired of their own voices and lost riches.”

Abdoh: I’ve always been concerned about how the narratives of people in places like Iran are too often channeled through a diaspora or a zeitgeist that exists in the West, with people who set themselves up as so-called experts. These sorts of people may not have been back in Iran for decades; in fact they may never have even been there, may not even know the language, or else they just parachute in for two weeks, and then they write “the book about Iran.” What happens is that, because of a lack of a bridge of language, the voices that are actually from there never get heard.

To me this is bullshit. It’s bullshit that everything is channeled through somebody sitting in Los Angeles or Washington, DC, talking about Iran, and usually someone opposed to the regime over there, but without a proper recognition of the nuances of the country and its people. From doing what I do — I’ve been doing this work for a quarter of a century now — I realized early on that it takes a lot to know a place. You really have to stay put for long stretches of time to understand the dynamic of a country, the little nuances that exist. Nowadays when I go to Iran, it’s true that I can stay just for, say, three weeks and come back, but that’s because I’ve already spent years cultivating many, many relationships in-location.

And when you do that, when you put in the time, you get to know people like Issa or Nasser, people who really want to do the right thing, but it doesn’t come easy for them. You know, in a way this book is really about the question of how a guy, a regular guy, in whatever circumstance, can prove himself as a human being. How does one “become” a man in this day and age when the paradigms have shifted? Everything has shifted for men, the whole context of the world, the whole background they come from.

Guernica: What you’re saying makes me think of Nasser, Issa’s friend, who has mastered the kind of syntax of violence in his neighborhood, and for whom violence is suddenly futile. It doesn’t make a woman out of the man he is in love with; it doesn’t absolve him in his own eyes. It doesn’t even help him avenge the suicide of the woman whose story starts the book — I’m thinking of the fight Issa and Nasser set out for at the beginning of the book.

Abdoh: Right — Issa is confused and reluctant to go, but then it turns out it’s Nasser who ultimately backs down.

Guernica: And Issa agitates when the widower of the woman — she never gets a name, does she? — provokes him. The man brags about the belt marks on his late wife’s face, and Issa is enraged.

Abdoh: She never gets a name, true. Issa recognizes this brutality, the brutality of men, and he wants to do something about it. But he decides that he needs to understand it first and then do something about it.

Guernica: Issa’s journey of understanding is so much wider than this one question, though.

Abdoh: Right. The culture you’re in, your tough background, the politics within that culture, what you’ve seen of the world, books you’ve read, things you’ve seen — how do you balance all of that out and maintain your sanity? And also do the right thing by human beings?

Issa doesn’t always want to do the things that are asked of him; it’s a pain in the ass. He’d rather just sort of be left, as we say in Persian, to eat his bread and yogurt. But he can’t walk away. He can’t walk away when he sees Nasser has begun abusing Mehran — whom he insists on calling Mehra, in the feminine. At the same time, Nasser is not necessarily an evil guy. He’s just confused. He looks at himself and doesn’t know who he is. And he takes it out on Mehran. And Mehran actually talks about it. He must really love me but, no thank you. All of these people, they struggle with their situations.

In this book all these guys have sketchy backgrounds. Nasser has begun abusing Mehran despite his love for him, Jafar — a decent man — was at one time in the Revolutionary Guards and probably did some unsavory things, and even Issa had to beat back protesters when he was in the army. I guess what I want to convey, through fiction, is that nothing is black and white. People are stuck in situations that are really complicated. Cultures are complicated. The best thing a fiction writer can do, like a good translator, is to bring out the nuances in the language of human beings.

Guernica: How do you do that? Of course, you’re Iranian; you speak Persian, so you can talk directly to people like Mehran or Nasser. And you are a prolific nonfiction writer, too. How do you find and understand and translate that nuance, especially from communities that you aren’t a part of, or at least are only superficially joined to as an Iranian?

Abdoh: What I do, I’d like to think, is more than journalism. I try to meld into the landscape. Some of my next project takes place in refugee centers. For example, when I went to Greece lately, I was just hanging out. I didn’t or wouldn’t go to a refugee center and say, “I’m here to do research.” I just go and sit. And maybe some Afghan guy brings me a cup of tea and starts talking to me. I’m just hanging out there, and we share the same language. There is a separation, of course, and that separation is good because it allows me to actually do my work. And at the same time, there is an intimacy I can’t live without. Whenever people ask me what I’m doing between books, I say I’m living the next book I’m going to write.

Guernica: You’ve lived this book in two ways. It comes from your personal experience, growing up in your family, and it comes from the time you’ve spent in Tehran, building the relationships you’ve talked about.

Abdoh: I would say, easily 90 percent of the book comes from real things — people I’ve known, or combinations of them. There was a person like Babacar in my life, and he was actually that big, and we were like brothers, and so forth and so on. The character of Aziz — a woman like that actually raised me. Of course, I put it all in a fictional form.

And I spent years of my life, as I was developing as a writer, working the night shift in hotels, where I knew the Babacars of the world, and many others. And they have so many stories — the world has so many stories.

People always ask me, “Salar, how can you fucking deal with the Shiite militias and then turn around and hang out with the LGBT community in Tehran?” And I say, That’s the thing. We all have to be able to do that. We all have to be able to do that. Because I want to understand the world I live in; I want to understand it in its totality. I don’t want to see just one side. I don’t want to sing to my own chorus; I want to see what the other guy is saying. When you do that, when you put yourself in the middle, when you throw yourself in that sea, anybody you hang out with becomes human. It becomes a completely different thing; it’s not in your head anymore. The world becomes something else than what you read in a magazine or saw on TV. It’s not theory you read in a class or someone taught you. There’s a person, alive, in front of you. And you might not even believe everything they say, but there it is.

You know, the thing I have trouble with in this world, is when you just paint one whole side, one whole set of people, as evil or bad. I think a lot of times human beings are put in really, really difficult situations, and they have to make really, really difficult decisions.

A few years ago I wrote, in Guernica, about a public execution, and that essay worked its way into this book: Issa is thinking about an execution he witnessed a few years back, and in the novel, as in the essay, there are these soldiers there to keep the crowd at bay while the guys are being hung from the fucking cranes. You think that soldier wants to be there? That he’s happy to see these young men get hung? No. But sometimes we human beings get thrown into situations that we have little control over. The book, if it’s about anything, is about how to keep your decency and your humanity in a world that has gone insane — that maybe was always insane.

Issa wants to do something about injustice — and at the same time, he could just as easily lay low. But first he needs to understand what injustice is. Issa is really me. I’ve come back to this culture, this country where these things happen too regularly, particularly in the province my father and my family comes from — these are questions I ask myself. And a person like me, who is in somewhat of a position of privilege, I have to do that. If I just sit here in my office and teach my classes and collect a paycheck — it isn’t enough. I have to ask these questions. I can’t live any other way. And so can’t Issa.