Under the Shadow of Jujube

Under the shadow of Jujube, written by Masoud Mohsenpour, was published in Ofoq Publishers. This is a novel about the small narratives that make our lives human and give meaning to our identity, personal and collective. The story is about a mother who has one daughter and three sons. At the age of nine, the mother is given to a middle-aged man and removed from the nomadic life. They go to Shushtar and the rest of the story about this city
is the passage of time, the passing of generations and the wheel that lifts people and plants
them elsewhere.

The novel has ten characters and each of them becomes the first-person narrator of a chapter of the story and describes the events in their own tone and context. What we read are the paths taken and the paths not taken, people who each left their homeland and joined with others and made the tree of life more fruitful.

With this perspective, if we look at the story, we may remember another masterpiece: As I Lay Dying, written by the great William Faulkner. In that work, each chapter was narrated by a narrator and the reader could see an event through the eyes of different people. In the works written with this technique, the reader can have a third-person view of the narrative;

It is as if he is watching everything from above and is a knowledge that touches the story with all his heart. On the other hand, Faulkner also mastered the South American dialects and had a strange accent himself. The dialect of the people of that region comes to life in the text.