My Uncle Napoleon
SynopsisPlot
“God forbid, I’ve fallen in love with Layli!” So begins the farce of our narrator’s life, one spent in a large extended Iranian family lorded over by the blustering, paranoid patriarch, Dear Uncle Napoleon. When Uncle Napoleon’s least-favorite nephew falls for his daughter, Layli, family fortunes are reversed, feuds fired up and resolved, and assignations attempted and thwarted.
Story
About this book
My Uncle Napoleon is a comic novel by Iraj Pezeshkzad, set within the walls of a large extended Iranian family compound. The story is told by a young narrator who, to his own alarm, falls in love with Layli, the daughter of the family's self-appointed patriarch, Dear Uncle Napoleon. The uncle earned his nickname from his own inflated sense of military glory, and he governs the household with bluster, suspicion, and an unshakable belief that the British are secretly orchestrating every setback in his life.
Around this central pair of conflicts, one romantic and one conspiratorial, the novel follows a cast of relatives, servants, and hangers-on whose feuds, alliances, and schemes shift constantly. Marriages are proposed and blocked, loyalties tested, and minor incidents magnified into crises. The narrator's attachment to Layli puts him directly at odds with Dear Uncle Napoleon, whose paranoia makes any suitor from the wrong branch of the family an automatic suspect.
Pezeshkzad originally published the novel in Persian in 1973, and it became one of the most widely read works of modern Iranian fiction. A popular television adaptation followed in the mid-1970s, further cementing the story in Iranian popular culture.
