Then the Fish Swallowed Him by Amir Ahmadi Arian (2020): A Review

Title: Then the Fish Swallowed Him

Author: Amir Ahmadi Arian

Publication Year: 2020

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Pages: 288

Source: audiobook @storytel.tr

Genre: historical fiction, Iranian fiction, political fiction

I cannot decide whether this is a 3.5-star or 4-star book, which feels strangely appropriate for a novel that left me unsettled rather than satisfied.

Let’s start with the title and cover, because I was deeply curious about them. Then the Fish Swallowed Him immediately calls to mind the story of Jonah, the prophet swallowed by a fish until he learns his lesson and returns to the right path. Here, the main character is named Yunus — aka Jonah — and the parallel feels painfully ironic. Or maybe irony is too soft a word for it. I believe the author somehow subverts the story, though I am not entirely sure how to name it. If we consider Yunus as Jonah and the solitary cell as the fish, then what does that leave the despotic system to be?

Yunus Turabi is an ordinary man: a bus driver, a commoner, someone with no political agenda, no heroic mission, no grand ideology. Compared to many protagonists I have read in Iranian fiction, he is almost nobody. And that is exactly what made the novel hit differently. This was one of the first times I read an Iranian novel centered on a working-/lower-class man from recent history — a history I lived through, a history tied to the day I finally decided to leave everything behind and look for a decent life somewhere else.

But this is not about me. It is about Yunus.

Yunus is a simple bus driver who lost everyone before the revolution. The reason he chooses that job is devastating in its quietness; I can only call it a coping mechanism. Years pass, and everything gets worse. Then worse again. And just when you think reality has reached its limit, you remember that imagination is no match for what Iranians have actually lived through.

On the day of a strike, everything collapses. Yunus is arrested and sent to the infamous prison: Evin. Evin Prison has sometimes been called “Evin University” because so many intellectuals, academics, writers, and political prisoners have filled its cells, while actual universities were generally left to the regime’s loyalists. Yunus is thrown into solitary confinement, interrogation, torture, and the machinery of forced confession — the kind of confession that can send a prisoner to the gallows.

Listening to or reading novels about Iran is already its own kind of torment. But listening to scenes of prison torture, interrogation, and coerced confession is something else entirely. It becomes unbearable because it is not distant enough. It is not safely historical. It is too close.

The novel moves between past and present, weaving Yunus’s memories through the torturous present of his imprisonment. Slowly, the questions begin to answer themselves: who, what, how, why, where — all of it emerging through pain. Importantly, Yunus is not an innocent bystander, though he is no political activist either. Some parts are raw in a way that makes you uncomfortable, but the discomfort feels deliberate. The author does not let you look away. He forces you to keep your eyes and ears open, to witness every detail you would rather not know. Or perhaps, in some way, to share the feeling of the torture.

I will not spoil the ending, but I will say that it landed differently for me because it touched something from my own life — a horrible day that pushed me toward the most important decision I have ever made. It is one thing to read about the collective trauma of another nation. It is another thing to read about the collective trauma of your own people, especially when that trauma is not over, when it is still being lived, and in some ways has become even worse.

So yes, maybe the book is not perfect. Maybe there are reasons to hesitate between 3.5 and 4 stars. But a book that makes you sit with this much pain, memory, class, fear, and recognition deserves to be taken seriously.

For me, that makes it a 4-star book.