Traitor!

A quick read.   I have a few small thoughts. I tend to skip over gruesome details, so every other chapter was a skim.

On writing:
I am sure that this book was written in two parts—one inside the prison and one before. Then the two parts were spliced together. I thought it made the book more palatable because the stories were so different. I wondered about chiasm. But the point? Maybe the following: Iran under “the primitives” is bad, torture is bad, but we can keep our humanity.

Was this book written by Hillman or by Zarah Ghahramani? I felt that, while the content of the book was obviously Zarah's, the writing was Hillmans. It almost seemed like the language had been forcibly simplified.

Suffering definitely eats away at her humanity. Jesse's quote, "It's OK if you already have character and wisdom and courage, but if you don't, suffering won't build such things in your heart and soul. It will consume what little courage you have, and then you are left with nothing." While she was left feeling empty, I think the refiners fire left more than nothing. I don't know if she emerged ennobled. I do think it's typical for suffering to mature/weather us. I think she grew up—not that she was immature before, only that the prison aged her, tempered her activist rage into a more intelligible emotion that will likely serve to influence more people than otherwise.

This book “made me sad.” I suppose that was the goal, but I wish it had made me more angry. When I'm saddened, I usually don't do anything—depression for me leads to inaction. I have to be mad to take action against injustice.