... absorbing ... Sofer, with great insight and urgency, depicts Iran—especially its capital city, Tehran—during a time of political and cultural transformation, which took that country’s people in multiple directions. She soaks us in the aftermath of its 1978 revolution, including what led up to it and what followed ... The glory of Man of My Time is in the author’s ability to project a range of possibilities—causes and outcomes—and bring them alive through her glistening prose and deep humanity.
Through the pain of Hamid’s alienation, Sofer, an Iranian-born Jew who grew up in the United States, has created a memorable and difficult character who can be seen as embodying the spiritual distress of Iran since the 1978 revolution. A powerful, complex, and profoundly anguished novel made more relevant by current tensions.
... darkly gripping ... Deserted by his wife and daughter, partly at his own encouragement, Hamid is a living breathing ghost or even ghoul, as is glimpsed by his erudite father in a late dream, a vision of a sculpture scarred, blinded and encrusted. It’s to Sofer’s considerable credit that she nevertheless renders Hamid’s voice and his narration so compelling. Perhaps the political box in which he finds himself is locked a little too neatly, perhaps his tone becomes too oppressive in the novel’s later pages, perhaps the novel’s middle section overstates. Nevertheless this is an ambitious, elegant story of metamorphosis, of a slow descent to ‘a constellation of heartbreak…for the betrayal, the love, the destruction' ... Restrained, precise, ineluctable, this is a fable for our anguished era.
... powerful ... A gorgeously written character study that examines, with sensitivity and pathos, the small steps that lead a man down an unexpected and ultimately isolating path.
We spend more time in Hamid’s childhood, his tumultuous adolescence, his angry young adulthood. The price we and the author pay, of course, for a story that looks back is that we know exactly where things are headed; our curiosity lies in how they get there. Fortunately, in this case, the trade pays off. With Sofer’s considerable talents, the betrayals (of both self and others) that leave Hamid a brittle shell of a man are fully worthy of our intense gaze ... Sofer’s characters deliver such preternaturally complete and impassioned speeches, ones so full of aphorisms, that it would be tempting to take a line from any one as a thesis for the book ... In the midst of the moral murk that constitutes our antihero’s soul, it’s helpful to have axiomatic arrows to follow. But Sofer is doing something more complex here than just handing us pithy answers. No one pronouncement sums up either Hamid or his situation; the sum of them, in all their disagreements, might get close ... Mindful of an audience not steeped in Persian history, Sofer goes out of her way to provide historical orientation — sometimes deftly, in old news clippings, and sometimes more heavily, in expository dialogue...While helpful for an uninformed reader, it’s perhaps a bit much for a chat with a child on the way home from the dentist ... raises the question not of whom the book is for but to whom it’s being narrated. To whom is Hamid Mozaffarian telling this story?...the book’s exposition is angled toward an outsider’s gaze — and there’s real discord between the narrative’s commitment to interiority and the sacrifices it makes in explaining itself. This is the perennial struggle faced by any writer whose imagined narrative audience and likely actual audience don’t fully align, but there are solutions more elegant than these ... The arc of Hamid’s life is finely wrought, a master class in the layering of time and contradiction that gives us a deeply imagined, and deeply human, soul — an enviable skill always, but essential for attaching us to a character who, despite his attempts at self-betterment, is essentially unforgivable ... The beating heart of American literature has always been the contributions of those looking both forward and back, both at America and at the world. Members not of skipped generations, necessarily, but of Janus-headed ones, writing toward something more difficult than forgiveness.
Ms. Sofer is at her best evoking Hamid’s pugnacious youth ... The aphoristic elegance of Ms. Sofer’s writing is one of the book’s attractions, but it is hard to square Hamid’s lucid, cultured narration with what we know of his character. Though he possesses an omniscient understanding of his descent into evil, his insights never bring about any interesting transformations. Instead, as Iranian history vanishes into the background, the chapters wallow in his feelings of shame ... While much in this book captured my imagination, the torturer’s tears left me unmoved.
With the pandemic as my reading context, I can’t help but view Dalia Sofer’s Man of My Time as an exploration of how political and social upheavals leave their marks on entire generations, and irrevocably alter those involved ... Much of the novel’s dark humor and thoughtfulness come from the deep disconnect between what we intuit about Hamid, and what he admits about himself. There are moments where those fractures are apparent ('What I failed to see . . . was that my father, too, as all men, had all along been constructing a chronicle of himself.') The novel’s most poignant insight derives from the irony that we as readers are trapped in a chronicle of a man who lacks self-awareness. Revolutions oust old orders and usher in new ones, but at incredible personal costs. Reading this novel amidst a pandemic intensifies its warning that we resist becoming, like Hamid and his father, people of 'our time,' people trapped and skipped over.
One is often tempted while reading this novel to think of Hamid as little more than an introspective species of monster. But Sofer brings compassion, insight, and acerbic humor to her depiction of a man at once too intelligent to altogether ignore the consequences of his behavior yet helpless to withstand the turbulent momentum of history ... A perceptive, humane inquiry into Iran's history and soul.
... mesmerizing and unsettling ... The tension between the elegance of Sofer’s language and the nihilistic unraveling of her antihero emphasizes the irony of the title, which lays bare the conceit that a person’s actions might be excused by historical context. Readers will find Sofer’s meditation on power’s ability to corrupt as relevant and disturbing as the day’s headlines.
