The Blind Owl is a surreal tale set in Persia that feels like a blend of Anna Kavan's Ice and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, or maybe Borges' Masked Dyer of Merv if it bled more imagery.

The narrator is beset by intrusive recurring thoughts: the derisive laughter of old men; an unrelenting Madonna-whore complex; a death drive and the desire for dissolution of the body. Pervasive images feverishly repeat in slightly different contexts: two old horses carrying lambs’ meat, the peddler with his wares strewn about, the purple water lilies, and one of my favorite lines:

Yes, I had seen the mark of his teeth, his two rotten, yellow teeth through which he spewed Arabic verses, on my wife's cheek.

All these symbols twist onto and out from the narrator in a figurative hall of mirrors, and despite the repetitions the slightly different descriptions and imagery feels different every time.

It’s not clear to what extent this is the narrator’s psychology. Is it the wine and the opium? Is it a madness inherent in him, or did sociological forces break him? Are there actual demonic forces at work haunting people across time? Is it a schizoid Nietzschean eternal recurrence?

I don’t know, but it is a definite delight that demands to be reread.