In a way, of course, the title is a lie. Women without men is an impossibility as long as women are defined first and foremost by their relationships to men, which obviously is no less true given the setting of the novel, but hardly unique to it either.

Women Without Men tell the story of a half-dozen women circling this issue while rarely able to confront it head-on - even if they do, even if they kill or die or return from death with the power to read minds or turn into a tree (yes, it's that kind of novel) there's always invisible barriers both within and without, a limit to the world in which they're allowed to exist. And since they have to share it, as women, of course, they sometimes find it easier to turn on each other, to find (real) differences rather than similarities. Nothing breeds contempt better than seeing your own limits in a mirror. Nevertheless...

(The subtitle is interesting. The book is mostly set pre-revolution (I think), yet it's explicitly called "a novel of modern Iran". The characters live in a modern world, they compare themselves and others to US movie stars, they speak openly (within closed doors) about sex, they inhabit a modern world - one that's supposedly been swept away by revolution, yet from this POV, doesn't look much different. Like any writer working under state censorship, there's sadly only so much you can get away with by claiming "What? I'm writing about how bad the previous regime was.")

Parsipur's writing (in Farrokh's translation) is odd; at once highly symbolic and fairytale-like, and matter-of-factly furious, in a way that sometimes works wonders, and sometimes makes it feel as if I'm reading two novels at once. At least one of them is very good, though.