TEHRAN – A Persian translation of American writer Anne Tyler’s 1985 novel “The Accidental Tourist” has been published.

Translated by Kayhan Bahmani, the book has been published by Saless.

Travel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises and anything outside of his routine. 

Immobilized by grief, Macon is becoming increasingly prickly and alone, anchored by his solitude and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer too optimistic to let Macon disappear into himself. 

Despite Macon’s best efforts to remain insulated, Muriel up-ends his solitary, systemized life, catapulting him into the center of a messy, beautiful love story he never imagined. 

A fresh and timeless tale of unexpected bliss, “The Accidental Tourist” showcases Tyler’s talents for making characters—and their relationships—feel both real and magical.

The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985 and the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986.

It was adapted into a 1988 award-winning film starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis, for which Davis won an Academy Award.

The New York Times Bestseller received great critical acclaim. In The New York Times, Larry McMurtry said, “Tyler shows, with fine clarity, the mingling of misery and contentment in the daily lives of her families, reminds us how alike—and yet distinct—happy and unhappy families can be. Muriel Pritchett is as appealing a woman as Miss Tyler has created; and upon the quiet Macon she lavishes the kind of intelligent consideration that he only intermittently gets from his own womenfolk.”

American critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, “It is from just such private lives that Miss Tyler herself has spun her own minutely detailed art, rendering them with such warmth and fidelity that her readers, too, are startled into a new appreciation of the ordinary and mundane. Like John Updike, she has taken as her fictional territory that sprawling American landscape of the middle class, and in 10 novels now, she has claimed as her special province the family in all its contrary dimensions.”

Photo: Front cover of the Persian edition of Anne Tyler’s novel “The Accidental Tourist”.

MMS/YAW