Iraj Pezeshkzad as a child, left, with his sister and their uncle, who was the inspiration for “My Uncle Napoleon.”

By Farnaz Fassihi

The New York Times

Iraj Pezeshkzad, a prominent Iranian writer and satirist who became a cultural figure after his blockbuster novel, “My Uncle Napoleon,” captured the imaginations of generations of Iranians, died on Jan. 12 in Los Angeles. He was 94.

Mr. Pezeshkzad (pronounced pez-ESHK-zaad) died of cardiac arrest in his sleep, according to his son and sole survivor, Bahman Pezeshkzad, an artist who lives in Paris.

The elder Mr. Pezeshkzad had been visiting friends in Los Angeles at the start of the coronavirus pandemic and decided to stay in California to avoid the risk of travel back to Paris, where he had been living since the end of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Despite being in exile for four decades, Mr. Pezeshkzad was one of Iran’s best-selling authors and most prolific satirists. He wrote 17 satirical novels and more than a dozen scholarly books and essays on history and literature.

He was best known for “My Uncle Napoleon” (1970), about an aristocratic family living in Iran in the 1940s as the country was modernizing. The patriarch is an uncle who briefly served in the military but who, with delusions of grandeur, compares himself to Napoleon, making up stories about battles he led with the British Army to liberate Iran and sharing conspiracy theories about the British. His servant and sidekick, Mash Ghasem, feeds these fantasies with laugh-out-loud humor, making him one of the most beloved characters in the book.

After Mr. Pezeshkzad’s death, an outpouring of grief spread on social media, uniting Iranians of many factions and political leanings. Prominent artists, cartoonists, writers and politicians as well as ordinary people praised Mr. Pezeshkzad for holding up a mirror to the nation, inviting it to self-reflect while laughing at itself.

“He wrote the biggest and most influential satire novel in our history; it’s the ‘Don Quixote’ of Persian literature,” Ebrahim Nabavi, a prominent satirical writer who lives in exile in Maryland, said of “My Uncle Napoleon” by phone. “If anyone wants to understand Iranian psychology, culture and politics, they must read his book.”

In an interview with BBC Persian in 2013, Mr. Pezeshkzad tearfully said that he dreamed of returning to Iran. But, he added, he did not want to return if the authorities would harass him for his writing or accuse him of insulting the ayatollahs. “I have never insulted anyone in my life,” he said.

He adorned the walls of his Paris apartment with verses from Persian poetry filled with longing for Iran, and he often mused about the challenges of writing about a society and its people from afar.

“I force myself to write something here,” Mr. Pezeshkzad said in the interview, adding, “If I had been in Iran, I would have written much more.”

“My Uncle Napoleon,” which has been translated into more than a dozen languages, remains a best seller in Iran more than 50 years after its publication. But Mr. Pezeshkzad told BBC Persian that he had received very little in royalties from sales of the book because there were no copyright laws in Iran.

A television series based on the novel was one of the most watched Iranian television productions ever, even though it aired just once before the revolution. It has been circulating in bootleg form ever since >>> Contine