... 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.
