House of Sand and Fog, II

Okaay, all finished. time now to read something that picks me up a little bit. chances are, i won't see the film made from this book.  it's just too outrageously feelbad, although i was curiously detached from any personal feeling about most of the characters.  i knew from the beginning, partly from reviews of the film, that there would be no Happy Ending, and i was simply following the train wreck from bad to much worse.

the story:  an Iranian immigrant, former officer in the Shah's Royal Air Force, now struggling to keep up the appearances of a rich expat life in the Bay Area, buys a bungalow at a tax auction with the intention of flipping it for a large profit.  the sale was a mistake on the county's part, a bureaucratic error in street addresses, but the sale is legal and final.  the former owner is a young woman who moved to California from Masssachusetts, newly married to a husband she met in rehab (booze and coke). the guy by now has left her, friendless and alone, cleaning houses for a meager living.  she and the cop who supervised her eviction are soon united in a mad effort to get the house back, as well as a sexual relationship leading down an alcoholic rabbithole. the deputy is probably the most interesting character in the book, complicated, conflicted about everything, looking for love in a very wrong place.  i'm sorry to say that we also have to add Col. Behrani's family, a married daughter, teenage son, and wife, to the characters dragged into the nightmare resulting from the ownership battle.

this is a long book and at the end the stage is as littered with bodies as a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. i think this may in fact be a contemporary version of a classical tragedy, and i may have to go away now and think about that.  take a look at Col. Massoud Behrani as a tragic hero, a man so dedicated to his vision of pride and honor that he is blind to everything else, and so loses all that truly most matters to him.  and, if i can think of it in those terms it might be interesting to see just what Ben Kingsley does with this character.  or, maybe not.