Reza Ghasemi’s third novel, The Spell Chanted by Lambs, was initially published in installments under the title of Madman and the Moonpars Tower on the author’s personal blog in 2002 as a reaction to censorship, making Ghasemi the first Iranian writer to turn to the Internet in the face of artistic suppression. It took six years to be traditionally printed by the Paris-based Khavaran Publications, and still five more years to be translated into English by novice translator Erfan Mojib. Says Mojib: “Ghasemi admits that he’s not aware of the existence of [online narrative] in other languages and is sure of [its] nonexistence in Persian literature, as he calls it the first Iranian ‘online novel’ and sarcastically labels the term as one of his own bastardizations.” Deeply rooted in the author’s musical background as a professional setar player (a Persian instrument in the lute family) and Iranian cultural traditions, such as the sacred function of the number forty as a symbol of accomplishment or achievement for mystics and common believers, The Spell Chanted by Lambs is a thirty-nine chapter account of the forty stages the narrator must complete in order to build the ideal setar and achieve musical perfection.Born in Isfahan in 1949 to an Iranian couple of Southern origin, Reza Ghasemi soon flourished as a talented musician and composer of songs (for masters of traditional music Shahram Nazeri and Mohammad-Reza Shajarian), and has also become a prolific writer of plays, short stories, and novels.
The nurse is from Martinique. She is one of those gorgeous delicate mulatto girls. If she is from good stock (like this one, who has taken my hand and is pumping) one can either fall in love with her or if his loving blade is dull he can only stare at the back of her delicate ears or at the strand of hair beneath her ear, and softly tell her in a voice that sounds as if it s coming from the depth of a bleak cellar, You don t have to measure my pressure jigar, you ll get tired.
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