writersmonthly.com- Farnoosh Moshiri's The Bathhouse, Reviewed by Melanie Jennings, The Bathhouse Powerful and chilling novel, The Bathhouse novel is a page-turner

If you're looking for a light summer read, something you can take to the beach and toss aside later like an empty soda can, you can safely ignore Farnoosh Moshiri's The Bathhouse. Powerful and chilling, this novel is a page-turner, a train wreck you can't turn away from.

An unnamed seventeen-year-old girl is taken in the night by "guards" to a ruined bathhouse-turned-political-prison soon after the revolution in her country (we assume Iran since the book is dedicated to the memory of executed prisoners of the Islamic Revolution there, but the actual text remains spookily vague). Packed into the back of a van filled with blindfolded men and women, the young woman recognizes her older brother and his wife.

“Do you know anyone here?" the pot-bellied guard asked.
I recognized my brother Hamid from the olive green shirt I had bought him for his thirtieth birthday, just a few months ago. His wife, Ferial, sat opposite him with the rest of the women. It was ridiculous to say I didn't know them.
"That's my brother," I said, "and this is my sister-in-law."
"Good girl! Now let me blindfold you!"
"But this is a mistake," I protested for the first time. "I'm not a political--"
"Close your mouth, bitch!"
"She is right, Brother," Hamid said. "She doesn't know anything." My brother was trying to be polite with the guards. I had never heard his pleading tone before.

Arriving at the bathhouse, the young woman plans to offer her inheritance money in exchange for the freedom of her brother and sister-in-law. She doesn't give her own case a second thought since she is clueless as to any of her brother's political involvements. When she is told to fill out forms and to "write the truth" so she can go home before morning, the full extent of her situation becomes clear to the reader.

I thought that of course I would write the truth, why shouldn't I? The truth was that I was not a member or even a follower of any organization. I'd just graduated from high school and was studying for medical school. I was neither a nationalist nor a Marxist nor a follower of any other ideology. I was just a selfish little girl who was immersed in her own life while most youth were struggling for freedom and justice. No, I wouldn't say the last part. What did I know about my brother and his wife? Nothing. I didn't even know the full name of their organization. And their team house of course was underground--no one except themselves and their teammates knew where it was. That was it. That was the truth and all that I knew.

This innocence does nothing to prevent a beating when a new guard arrives to check on the girl. It's the first of many such inexplicable abuses. We come to understand that her captors are religious fanatics and that the girl "hadn't even learned how to pray."

The girl spends the next few weeks sitting on the cramped stone floor of a small cell with several other women. Often a "raven," a woman who has "repented" her crimes and now spies for the guards, is present in the cell with the women. On the nights she is absent they stay up late.

…we sat up late and talked in whispers. Rumors were exchanged, gossip, stories, fantasies. These were ordinary women, after all. None were a professional activist, a militant, a guerilla fighter, or a politician...We exchanged the news we had heard in the toilet lines, in the interrogation rooms, from Baba [the janitor], or someone from the next cell. Leila had heard that they raped the virgins before execution. Because if they killed them as virgins, they'd send them straight to heaven. They wanted to send them to hell. We talked about this rumor for a long time. Dr. Mina believed that this was impossible, such a crime could never happen. It would cause international reaction; the United Nations would intervene. We all laughed when she mentioned the United Nations.

Over time and one by one, each of the women disappears as they are either executed or released. And it gets worse, much worse, for the girl. After a particularly horrifying stoning scene, she actually feels happy. "Nothing was unbearable after the stoning. Nothing was painful or scary. How simple and easy was our life in the Bathhouse. How calm was everyone. How well we slept, how well we ate." By the time a new round of women is assigned to the cell, the girl has endured so much that she simply tries to sleep through the days. At this point, as a reader, your jaw muscles have just about ground your teeth to dust from the tension, the misery. Yet for the girl, the more she endures, the more peace she experiences. During a torture where the women are stuffed into tiny cardboard boxes and left overnight in a wet field, the girl listens to a toad singing. "...my toad sang in the dark and made me smile. I breathed deeply and listened to him." These moments are all she has left of the memory of a normal life. The relationships between women are provocatively explored in this novel. In some cases there are deep, life-saving bonds which develop between the girl and the other women prisoners. Yet other scenes depict female guards perpetrating crimes against the female captives (often by collaborating with the men). Moshiri's use of simple language in these scenes makes them incredibly powerful. By telling the story of one young girl we come to understand the terrifying response of some to a political revolution and how that response gets manipulated for the purpose of torture and repression. Moshiri illuminates the dangers of fanaticism through her memorable characters and their incomprehensible situations. The Bathhouse belongs on every woman's bookshelf.

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