The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree Summary
Shokoofeh Azar

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree Overview

Azar implements the use of magical realism in order to tell a fantastic yet tragic first person and fictional account of an Iranian family’s experiences through political revolution and war. The novel’s narrator, 13-year-old Bahar, dies at the beginning of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and thus narrates her family’s experiences as a ghost, who move from Iran’s capitol city to the small town of Razan. Inspired by her own life as an Iranian political refugee, Azar incorporates her experiences into the novel as the central characters struggle with the death and devastation the war brings to them. As Bahar observes both the lives and deaths of each of her family members, Azar creates a heart wrenching narrative that focuses on themes of war and politics, death and transformation, cultural identity and censorship, myth and mysticism, and sex and gender.