Aliof's Garden

Aliof’s Garden is a memoir of the Iranian painter, Farhad Ostovani. At the heart of the book are the author’s memories of a childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran, a culture he experiences as an abundance of colors, perfumes, foods, and unforgettable characters, all in an improbable landscape where deserts meet dense olive groves and mountains seem to rise from the sea.

The book is also a record of the development of a sensibility, an education influenced by those childhood memories, but also by Ostovani’s later voyage to the West, to France where
he has spent most of his adult life, by the challenges of displacement, by the friendships he has made with other creative people (Louis-René des Forêts, Yves Bonnefoy, Jean Starobinski, Jerome Robbins), and by the importance of music, especially J.S. Bach, to his work as a painter.

What sets apart Aliof’s Garden as special is Ostovani’s ability to access the feeling of the past and to describe the emotional content of the art he makes and of the art and artists who play significant roles in his life. The book is marked by an unusual immediacy and simplicity of style. The essays in Aliof’s Garden were written in English between 2007 and 2016. The author wrote an introduction in 2017 for the collection of the essays into a single volume, published in French by L’Atelier contemporain (Strasbourg) in 2018. (Robert Bemis)