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Solacers  By  cover art

Solacers

By: Arion Golmakani
Narrated by: Neil Shah
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Publisher's summary

Solacers tells the touching story of a boy's search for family life and safety following the divorce of his parents in Iran during the 1960s. The first child of a heartless father and a discarded mother is left to fend for himself on the streets of Mashhad, seeking food and shelter wherever he can. His lonely early years are an unbelievable tale of cruelty and betrayal on the part of nearly everyone who might be expected to help, save for one aunt who does her best to keep him from starving.

But living a harsh and solitary existence has one advantage for this little boy: other than forcing him to be self-reliant, no one attempts to indoctrinate him on rural Iranian society's archaic cultural values and religious beliefs. And so he never accepts his wretched state as fate, choosing instead to dream big dreams about getting an education, having his own family, and starting a new life - possibly in the faraway land called America.

He makes a plan and by the age of 17 he boards a plane to the land of possibilities, where his dreams eventually also take flight.

©2011 Arion Golmakani (P)2017 Tantor
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

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Interesting.

Very sad in the beginning but offer some life lessons. Being a immigrant and poor I truly understand some of what he went thru

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Very nice but sad story

It was a good glimpse of pre revolutionary Iran and the tribulations of one poor child.

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A moving book

I loved most of the book but was disappointed in the end when the mutual dream sequence that sounded so important was never finished and I felt hanging. I know it was a memoir so he couldn’t change the end, but he could’ve addressed that. I’m trying to critique it without giving away the story.

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Not just a memoir!

I’m not sure I would have bought this myself but it was offered free for a limited time and was rated highly so I picked it up. I’m glad I did, otherwise I would have missed one of the best books I’ve read in a while. Arion Golmakani has written a memoir but it is not at all a typical memoir. 

Golmakani, called Alireza as a child, was born in Iran but his father divorced his mother when Alireza was very young and refused to take any responsibility for him, his younger sister, or his mother. She struggled to support them at even a minimum level with whatever work she could get and by selling some jewelry she had managed to hide when her husband left and her family could offer little help either. Life seemed to get better when another man married her but he was an uneducated tailor and when they began to have children of their own, he pushed her to send Alireza and his sister to their father and demand that he support them which his heartless father refused. Instead, he beat the mother and repeated attempts only lead to further threats and beatings and the disappearance of his sister. At age 5, Alireza was was rotating among various foster homes where his father would pay for one month, promising to return with following months but would not do so, leaving Alireza to be kicked out. Eventually his mother and step-father move away to Tehran, his father becomes even more cruel despite becoming more and more wealthy, and Alireza is left to fend for himself on the street scavenging for food and shelter where he can with only an aunt who does her best to keep from starving but she also with very limited means. 

There were occasional glimmers of hope that often didn’t last very long but when Alireza is seven, he is taken to another home. Again his father fails to continue to make the support payments but Kia, a fifteen-year-old boy and the only son, treats Alireza as a younger brother and insists that he must be enrolled in school. Even when her son leaves to join the military, Kia’s mother tries to help as she can even as her own situation becomes severely strained. Although he continues to live on the streets and occasionally with various distant relatives for a few nights, but even then, only for shelter not for food. He mostly has to scavenge for food thrown away by others. Still, Alireza manages to stay in school and even graduate from high school. But his life, essentially without a home and without family has given him few emotional ties to Iran though he knows that leaving would be impossible for someone without money or connections. Even finding a job is very difficult without connections but he hears that, with the close ties between Iran and the United States (before the Islamic Revolution), the military sends their brightest to the US for training. He decides to join the Iranian Navy, which eventually brings him to the United States where he was in training when the Shah was overthrown, leaving him unable to return.

Why read a book that is just about such a struggle for existence in a foreign country? One reason is that, as you read through this story starting from the late 1950s through the mid 1970s, you get a very different picture of the Iranian people than most people think of today. There was systemic corruption that left most people struggling or with just enough to survive while a few lived lavishly. But even for the average person, there was a close connection with the West and with the US. Tehran was called the Paris of the Middle East and was a fashion center. Alireza was a fan of the Beatles in high school as were most of his classmates. Another reason is that it is a fascinating story of survival and we all love stories where we are able to cheer on an underdog and watch them continue to survive against all odds. 

However, that’s not why I recommend this book. Golmakani writes in a very friendly and natural style, more like sitting on the sofa and relating his story to you. It is written from the memory of a child so you won’t find any discussions of history or politics and even very little discussion of religion except at the points where it affected him. And yet the story is so horrendous that it is easy to keep thinking, “how could anyone do this to a child?” Some of the people he describes can only be described as utterly cruel. Others were possibly just insensitive. But it is also probably difficult for us to understand what it is like to truly not have enough even for yourself, to want to help someone and yet to have nothing to share without endangering the lives of your own. And that would make any story like this extremely depressing. And yet, I didn’t find it to be so. It was heavy and it was sad. I felt anger at times. I felt disbelief. But there was always something uplifting as well. You will notice the title of the book, “Solacers,” and he uses that word throughout for those who helped him or encouraged him in little ways. What comes through is how he focuses on those who helped far more than he focuses on those who caused him such grief, including his father. I wanted to scream at his father but he simply related events without judgment or condemnation. He just moves on. His focus is on those who showed him solace, or I would probably say, love.  

This is the kind of book that might make you cry, but if it does, it won’t be because of his sad life. It will be because of his gracious recounting of his story and how clearly he has been able to move on without bitterness. It will be because you see a heart that is grateful for things that we might have thought was so little that they didn’t even deserve the term “acts of kindness.” It will because you realize how ungrateful that we are for the abundance that we have and hoard. He has not written the story of Arion Golmakani, Alireza. He has written the story of the Solacers, the many people who gave even the smallest things to help him survive. 

I wish everyone would read this book.

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One of my new favorites

Solacers has easily become one of my new favorite stories. My father also came to the US as part of the IIN pre-revolution, and hearing these stories was like listening to the stories my father is no longer around to tell. I appreciated the bits of Farsi the author included (bastani was one of my first Farsi words!) and the detailed descriptions of people, places and food. The author's insight into the culture and balancing the feeling of loving Iran but also having the desire to go to the US helped round out the story nicely. Possibly my only quam was that I felt as if the narrator pronounced some of the Farsi and Persian names differently than I expected. However, I do appreciate that the narrator appears to have Middle Eastern roots.

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moving and humbling

I loved every minute of this heart wrenching story. It made me feel, cry, laugh, and appreciate my life. A must read for all.

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I couldn’t put this book down!!

Having left Iran at a young age, I always long to know more about my birthplace.

I had to shed a few tears in this book it was beautiful and revealing about a society a little

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over exaggerated

the story is over exaggerated, the poor soul, a third world orphan with a terrible life, result of the society as a whole, seeks refuge in shining America. the writer's own symbolic escape from humiliated himself.

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