House of Sand and FogHouse of Sand and FogI read House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III. This story is one of classic tragedy which also contains a nearly unbearable amount of suspense. It tells a story of the conflict between people of different races who have an inability to understand each other. They each want possession of a small house in the California hills but for very different reasons.
On one side, there is Kathy Nicolo and Sheriff Lester Burdon who want the house from which Kathy was evicted. It previously belonged to Kathy’s father and she is reluctant to relinquish possession of it. Then there is the Behranis, a Persian family who was forced to flee to America in fear of their lives. They want the house because it symbolizes their rise from poverty (they had to leave everything behind and were quite poor when they arrived in the United States) back to affluence which, to this family, will help to restore their family’s dignity, lost when thrust into poverty. The story centers on gaining possession of the house. Unknowingly, all of these characters are doomed to tragedy by their inability to understand each other, hurtling down an explosive collision course.
The main characters in this story are Sheriff Lester Burdon, Kathy Nicolo, Massoud Amir Behrani, Mrs. Behrani, and their son, Esmail Behrani. Lester has a very soft spot in his heart for battered and abandoned women, an outlook that Burdon attributes to his fathers having left his mother when Lester and his brother were teenagers. Kathy is a house cleaner who had inherited the house from her father, but lost it because she couldn’t afford the mortgage. She is a genuinely kind person, but is very arrogant and bull-headed sometimes. Mr. Behrani is a former colonel in the Imperial Air Force of Iran. Behrani served Shahanshah Reza Pahlavi faithfully and effectively until the Shah’s overthrow in 1979, which also destroyed the privilege, power, wealth, and position of people like Colonel Behrani. He is very wise but has a quick temper that he usually controls. Mrs. Behrani is a kind woman but not very smart and cannot speak English very well. Esmail is a very kindhearted
Mrs. Behrani’‬. He is a family man and the two share a house in the upscale town of Marik in southwest Iran because the man who took over the household had a wife and two kids while he was out of town. Esmail‬ was always involved in politics and politics can be pretty dark in Iran. . He had no problem expressing his opinions openly, although some of the others were quite crude, but was always in a state of fear for his life, and often expressed his disapproval. . I don’t think Burdon‬ is being sarcastic or that he’s a crazy person, but I do think that he will be very careful and be ready to deal. If he does make an appearance in the story it will be in a private house, which is a lot less expensive and less painful. And if he does make an appearance, and he isn’t going to try to talk to us, I don’t think he will. I hope he will be in full control of his own thoughts and not use his personal computer, especially since a lot of information about us (including our telephone numbers) is personal to him and he may not have a great sense of humor about this, but I think it´s a very safe way for him to put information out there to people and he should be careful of anything that he sees. ——————————————————————————- CHAPTER 40 HISTORY I have known Mrs. Behrani since she was three years old from the day she was born in Iran. At fourteen I knew her from my father’s picture book “Motherly Love.” Once I brought the book home and we talked about her. The first time I ever saw her was at a party on the beach when we were just beginning to leave. She was so nice and kind she would always take all of my gifts. But the second time I saw her was when I was a young teenager in Tehran, when I was about 16. But I never looked at her so she could only look at me. She was beautiful, beautiful – I had never seen anyone with her before. In fact, her hair was the hair of the only other girl he was ever with and she was so big. I didn´t know what kind of a man she was until we went to school together. We were going across the street to one of the school buildings where other students were being brought up at or where we might meet one of the girls at the time. She would stay in the hallway when I came there, usually wearing a bright green silk dress she had just worn. I have never seen her as if she were a kid. I think that I may have misunderstood her even from my first face picture. She made a very small face when I met her in college – a child’s face. But I also noticed that the shape was different. The shape I was wearing in my first photo was completely different. And then I saw it again when I was very young. But this time I wasn´t surprised by her. Now I can think of nothing I would have considered wrong with this face because I think I looked right at her, and I remember thinking, Why is she so happy so suddenly to me? I did have some regrets because I only remember her seeing me now on the phone because I was so confused that I didn´t feel any emotion. The very first photo that showed the face was in my class as a child, a few years ago, in “Tehran”, an independent journalism school. I was at home when I got to see her: it was the school’s first day of class, and I saw her with two big smiles on her face. One was over her