The Mourners of Bayal

Synopsis

The Mourners of Bayal is a collection of eight interrelated stories centered around the people of Bayal, an imaginary Iranian village in the middle of nowhere. This work is a penetrating allegory of the manners, beliefs, hopes, and desperations of rural Iranians in the early seventies. The Mourners of Bayal is a very early example of magical realism. It precedes the works of masters of the genre, José Saramago, and Gabriel García Márquez. The most famous of the eight stories is the fourth (they are numbered without a title) which was adapted into a popular movie, The Cow.