Man of My Time by Dalia Sofer (2020): A Review

Title: Man of My Time

Author: Dalia Sofer

Publication Year: 2020

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Pages: 386

Source: audiobook at @storytel.tr

Genre: Historical fiction, Persian Literature, Perpetrator Fiction

How cruelly ironic it is to read a novel like this at such a time (i.e., to be living through the darkest chapter in your country’s history, with thousands massacred in two days and countless more dying since) only to pick up a book whose main character is complicit in the very machinery of that violence. The timing of this read feels almost like a deliberate wound, a twist of fate that deepens the sense of national grief and fury.

I began Man of My Time knowing nothing about the plot or protagonist, simply following my resolution to read one Persian novel each month. Within the first pages, I was so disturbed by the perspective that I had to research the author, desperate for reassurance that she was not a regime sympathizer. Once certain of her opposition, I braced myself for a reading experience guaranteed to shatter my spirit and stoke my anger. To continue reading about an interrogator of the regime—especially now, while an entire nation is in mourning—felt like an act of self-inflicted pain. Yet I pressed on, seeking some catharsis in confronting this darkness.

The novel is a bleak, unorthodox bildungsroman tracing Hamid Mozafarian’s path from childhood to his failed quest for redemption. He is no bystander, no tragic pawn: he is an active perpetrator, a man who becomes the system he once thought he could change. Reading about such a character is deeply disturbing. It haunts, disgusts, and unsettles, forcing you to wonder whether evil results from ordinary people whose consciences are slowly corroded by being part of a monstrous regime. With each page, my hatred for Hamid grew—not just for his actions, but for his self-deception, his compartmentalization, and his attempts to justify the unforgivable. Even the glimpses of his humanity as a son, husband, or father did nothing to soften my revulsion. Some lines, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed, and they transform a person into something irredeemable.

There is no hope or absolution in this book. Hamid’s journey is not one of escape or transformation, but of deepening complicity. Any small act of goodness (i.e., saving a single life, leaking a fragment of truth) cannot begin to atone for the scale of his crimes. The novel is unflinching in its depiction of a man who, at every turn, chooses brutality and betrayal. His fate, and the fate of those like him, is to remain beyond redemption. No narrative twist, no late repentance, can erase the horrors he has helped unleash. Some acts stain the soul forever, and some characters—like Hamid—are lost to the darkness they embraced.

“We will never forgive and we will never forget.”