Massoud Noghrekar:
The Jesus of Golden Cemetey
Cover and drawings by M K Sadigh
Publish America 2012
In Massoud Noghrekar's Novel emotions overflow in form of hyper-motion.No one is real sick but lives in hyperreality,still observed ,to the degree of breakdown or breaking the rules of power .
In Massoud Noghrekar's Novel emotions overflow in form of hyper-motion.No one is real sick but lives in hyperreality,still observed ,to the degree of breakdown or breaking the rules of power .
The Jesus of Golden Cemetery is a novel about patients and employees being victimized in mental institutions by money and power,according to first hand experiences and observations of author,as a staff and evening supervisor of psychiatric ward in real life . In these institutions of "don't think and ask,but just work",due to competition,corruptions and lack of professional managements with specialty training ,a broken team is running the show,as nowadays could be seen in similar workplaces or almost everywhere .In broken team,there are usually a circle of power and decision making,on the basis of profit making only,an entourage of clicks and spies who report all the details to the boss,and there are also hard working staffs,at times overqualified like the narrator of this novel,being victims of the system similar to their patients.Patients symbolically are drenched in their urine and feces,unattended,while the so called"facility"is being run by their money and financed by their families for benefits of corrupted power network.
Dr Noghrekar in his generally report-like narrative explains how the management is out of touch to the degree of making fun of patients and firing hard working employees.The climax of his story is when one of his patients leaves this mental facility and commit suicide in a local motel.These are the well to do patients and still being treated unfair by a brutal system who is still reminder of what is being researched by Michel Foucault in his book:The Birth of Asylum,and fantastically presented in One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest ,a 1962 novel of Ken Kasey and 1975 movie drama made on that basis by Milos Forman, with paranoid,childish,delusional characters played by Jack Nicholson ,Louise Fletcher,Danny De Vito among others.Mc Murphy's behavior is inciting and provocative ,though Chief Bomden is a silent Native American,deaf and mute .But in Noghrekar's novel everyone likes to speak up and still the challenge is : Gorsha pointed to the yellow sign and shouted,"Mr Shody don't return here.It is a dead end",p.15
Love is always lacking in care of these people,detached from society with misfortune,in all these stories and so causes hatred,and that is why Hillary,a major character of Noghrekar's novel,and a poet sings:
Love is gorgeous
Love is beautiful
Like a butterfly
Love is ugly
Love is polite No matter what love is
It's fragile like a butterfly
It is fragile
Like Hillary.
p.129
p.129
Massoud Noghrekr(Baboli),writer,researcher and political activist ,born 1952 in Tehran,Iran,started writing short stories by age 16.He acquired his M.D. degree in 1978 and lived and worked in Germany and then since 1993 in The U.S. as well. Of 28 volumes of books in literature,politics and medicine ,Noghrekar recently published his novel : The Kids of Slums in 2 volumes,by Forugh Publishing ,2013/1392 in Persian/Farsi.This book also will be reviewed in Moj Book Review soon
-MBR
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