Trout Fishing In Tehran

On the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, an Iranian writer (and devoted Brautigan reader) considers how he, perhaps even more than other Beat writers, achieved a wide readership in Tehran.

The story of how I met Richard Brautigan in Tehran begins in 2011, when I attended a film workshop where many American movies were shown and analyzed by Iranian critics. One of the films presented was Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), which, I believed, depicted the truth of the Vietnam War and the traumas suffered by American soldiers, and to be honest, Platoon was the only reason I attended the workshop in the first place.

Here’s what happened. They showed the film, the critics began discussing it, and I was enjoying the conversation well enough until a guy with a large retro-western mustache, seated in the rear of the room, began asking questions. The guy’s retro-western mustache was so remarkable that I have completely forgotten whatever it was he asked of the critics. After the discussion broke up, I stayed behind to talk to one of the critics about the film program I was managing as a student at my university.

Before I left, I heard a voice behind me: “Do we know each other? I feel I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

It was the guy with the retro-western mustache, and he explained that he had seen me at my school, where he too was enrolled. I have always had my doubts about the idea of coincidence—but it seemed to work well for me and the guy with the retro-western mustache. That night, we had a long conversation about cinema and literature, and we stayed in touch by text messages, chatting at length about the United States and its cinema. Mustache guy had many cousins who lived in the States, and he knew a lot about the land of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Of course, we began dating and attending workshops together, and mustache guy lent me many of his American postmodern novels.

But, Dear Readers, this is not a love story about me and the guy with the retro-western mustache. It’s a story about how mustache guy introduced me to Richard Brautigan.