TEHRAN – Scottish writer Muriel Spark’s debut novel “The Comforters” has been published in Persian.

Translated by Shima Elahi, the book was published by Now.

Caroline Rose is plagued by the tapping of typewriter keys and the strange, detached narration of her every thought and action. 

Caroline has an unusual problem - she realizes she is in a novel. Her fellow characters also seem deluded: Laurence, her former lover, finds diamonds in a loaf of bread - has his elderly grandmother hidden them there? 

And Baron Stock, her bookseller friend, believes he is on the trail of England’s leading Satanist.

Although completed in late 1955, the book was not published until 1957. 

A mutual friend, novelist Alan Barnsley, had sent the proofs to English writer Evelyn Waugh. At the time Waugh was writing “The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold”, which dealt with his own drug-induced hallucinations.

Waugh’s and other positive responses prompted Macmillan to publish the novel in February 1957 in the United Kingdom, and it was also published that same year in the United States. 

The novel’s quick success enabled Spark to give up editorial work and devote herself to full-time creative writing. It has been published in several editions in the United Kingdom and the United States since then.

Spark was a prolific writer whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century.

Photo: A combination photo shows Muriel Spark and the front cover of the Persian edition of her novel “The Comforters”.

MMS/YAW