Iranian writer Mandanipour delivers a series of stories that are alternately spectral and somber but altogether subversive.In the opening story, "Shadows of the Cave," a widower quietly defies the new Iranian theocracy by wearing a dark suit and tie, "which since the revolution has been considered ‘the leash of civilization' and is unofficially banned," in order to visit his wife's grave in a cemetery now crowded with victims of the mullahs. He defies the censorial dictates of the regime as well, keeping a large private library, nursing memories of a long-ago post before the shah's coup d'état of 1953. The library-and this is the crux-focuses on animals, with which Mr. Farvaneh has a philosophical obsession: "At times," he intones, "their indifference to humans is truly insulting." In the title story, Iran's war with Iraq provides a scenario in which endless suffering breeds just that indifference to other humans, as a wounded Iraqi in no-man's land eventually disintegrates against an exposed hillside. Remarks the Iranian narrator, "One day, we noticed that his lips had decomposed-it was the worms' doing-his long teeth were exposed; he looked like he was laughing. Late one night, an animal ripped off his arm and took it away, but he didn't fall." Nasser, the doomed Iraqi soldier, is a drag on morale on both sides, but there's nothing anyone can do until finally an officer, driven nearly mad by combat, erases his presence with a rocket. In "Seven Captains," speaking to current headlines, another soldier gloomily remarks of the power plant he's guarding, "There's talk that the Westerners have said they'll bomb it. If they do, people say we'll all die….Do you think they're right?" Death comes in many forms in stories marked by symbolic animals: fish, worms, cuckoos, cowering dogs, snakes that hide among "the arabesque motif on the carpet," everywhere they can trouble the dreams of struggling humans.A skilled storyteller with a bent for the quietly macabre and the burdens of those crushed by totalitarian rule.

Mandanipour (Moon Brown) skillfully fuses the poetic and the brutal in this complex and intense collection. The care and humanity of his voice adds poignancy to plots anchored by violence. Many of the stories feature animals: an elusive leopard is at the center of -The Color of Midday Fire,- about a deep friendship rooted in war. In -Shadows of the Cave,- the mysterious baker Mr. Farvaneh declares that -man became man when he withdrew from the animal kingdom-; and the shadow of vicious stray dogs haunts the narrator of -Seven Captains.- While the turmoil and danger of everyday life in Iran are the backdrop, Mandanipour focuses on the personal struggles of the characters and their hardscrabble lives. The harrowing title story charts the slow disintegration of a man wounded in battle, who seems oblivious to the activity around him. These haunting, urgent works are as nuanced and provocative as the lives they depict, and they defy easy categorization and neat takeaways, as reflected in an enigma offered up by the narrator of -Shadows of the Cave,- first published in 1985: -Meanings, often contrary to common perception, are the image of their own meaninglessness.- Prolific in Iran though relatively new to U.S. readers, this author deserves greater attention. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Jan.)