[QCrit], RUMI’S WOUND, adult literary, 80k, attempt 3(?)
Hi all, thank you in advance for any comments and thoughts!!
Disclaimer: I don’t know the exact attempt number - I sent it in a couple times to QCrit over a year ago and have since done a complete rewrite/reworking of my MS and query(so it’s more like attempt 100 aha).
RUMI’S WOUND is an 80,000-word contemporary literary fiction novel that pairs the tender lyricism of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water with the feverish interiority of Ia Genberg’s The Details. It arrives at a moment when Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? has brought the dilemmas of cross-cultural love into the mainstream, and when novels like Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Marjan Kamali’s The Lion Women of Tehran signal a growing readership for Persian literary voices. Given your interest in {personalisation}, I hope you find it to be a great fit to your list:
Roya only ever falls in love the way her beloved Persian poets do – with all of herself. So, when she meets Casper in the final year of her maths PhD, it doesn’t matter that her body freezes during sex, or that they have, at most, a year together. She falls for him regardless. Within the stone walls of Cambridge, in its piano rooms and cloisters and high-ceilinged halls, their dialogues turn more intimate, more unguarded.
But their love aches with inherited wounds. So much is lost when translating between his culture and hers, between his Swedish individualism and her Persian mysticism. And when her parents break their wedding vows – on the stroke of Norouz, in front of the mirror that generations of her family have smiled into – something breaks in Roya too.
With Roya retreating further into dissociation and his own grandfather slipping away into dementia, Casper feels old instincts return: to cauterise, to leave before he is left. But before he goes, he stumbles upon a worn poetry book – one of only three items Roya’s mother fled the ‘79 revolution with: a book of Rumi’s poems, a mirror and a rose-gold wedding ring. Over the following years, under the copper spires of Stockholm and the tall pines of northern Sweden, each item reappears, bringing crisis – and, perhaps, a chance for Casper and Roya to rewrite their inherited story.
I am a Persian-Swedish graduate of the University of Cambridge, now studying in London for my PhD in computer science – fiction is perhaps not quite what my professors meant when they said I should publish! Like Roya, I am obsessed with Rumi – and the recent wave of new translations from publishers like NYRB Classics speaks to a hunger for fresh approaches to his work. Any one translation carries only a fraction of his philosophical and emotional depth; RUMI’S WOUND offers another piece of that depth, in narrative form.
{sign off}