Death in Persia

Lindsay Hasluck's Review

A slim book is easily overlooked, but this work of travel literature is not to be missed. Translated from German, these musings from the mid-1930s from archaeologist Annemarie Schwarzenbach cover her multiple research trips to Persia. Escaping the rise of fascism in Germany, she tries to live in Persia, travelling across the country by foot, hoof and car, excavating in the ruins of Persepolis, and living in tents in the Lar Valley at the end of the world. She finds moments of physical, if not mental respite in the dusty cities of Tehran and Rages, amongst others.

The journal is not about archaeology as such, but a recounting of her relationship with the emptiness, alienness and desolation that time-worn Persia leaves on her soul. With touching tenderness, her strength and vulnerability, self-reflection and insight into her circumstances are made all the more poignant by her experience of continual fevers and the unattainable love of a young tortured Turkish woman, Jalé.

Delicately edited and translated, the prose is a vehicle back into another age. Annemarie’s writing has a desolate beauty and depth, and an uncertain sense of her spirituality. Her words are so cleverly stitched together, and with an unusual detachment for a journal, that Death in Persia is an absolute joy to read, slowly, immersively; especially after so much current commercial dross. Reading it, we know and feel the inner emptiness of crossing the sun- scorched plains and ragged snow-capped mountains.

Read it first for the narrative, a second time for the prose, and a third time because you too are under the musky spell of Persia. A work of aching beauty, a rarity of the human spirit, and a testimony to the depths of the feminine soul. An important role-model for strong femininity. I wish I could read it in German. I’m putting it in our Must Reads shelf.

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Other Reviews

'Few of Schwarzenbach's own writings have been translated into English, and even fewer are available in print . . . Finally, we have the opportunity to read her: Seagull Books have reissued two recent and excellent translations of Schwarzenbach's literary travel writing. Death in Persia was only published in German in 1998, long after Schwarzenbach's death, and first published in English translation by Lucy Renner Jones in 2012. All the Roads Are Open, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, was first published as a full English collection in 2011. Together, they map Schwarzenbach's dual struggle to overcome her own inner conflicts and, somehow, to resist the fascism that overran Europe as she made her way to Afghanistan in 1939.' - Helen Finch, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was a writer, journalist, photographer and queer icon who worked periodically as an archaeologist. She wrote over 80 newspaper articles while traveling in Switzerland, the US, Portugal, the Congo and Morocco, and is also the author of Lyric Novella and two travel narratives: All the Roads Are Open and Death in Persia.