"Winner of the 2001 French Human Rights Prize, French-Iranian author [Fariba] Hachtroudi's English-language debut explores themes as old as time: the crushing effects of totalitarianism and the infinite power of love. The Man Who Snapped his Fingers is a novel of ideas, exploring power and memory, by an important female writer from a part of the world where female voices are routinely silenced."
The jacket says this is her English debut but the novel was originally published in 2014 as "Le colonel et l'appât 455"
The main characters are Bait 455, an unbreakable prisoner of an ideological republic and one of the colonels closest to the Supreme Commander. They meet years later in unnamed country, although I believe it is Russia. When they meet, they develop, perhaps surprisingly, a relationship based on a shared history of violence and suffering, as well as undying love.
When I started this novel, it immediately reminded me of a film I had watched in grad-school as part of a Global Women's Cinema course. The film in question was Incendies and is about a former female-prisoner during the Lebanese Civil War. The two female prisoners are notorious for their unbreakable spirit; in the case of Bait 455 she never speaks, and in Nawal, the protagonist of Incendies, she is known as the women who sings "la femme qui chante". Both also have an interesting relationship with their jailers/torturers.
I have seen the movie of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, but I think I will try reading it and perhaps check out Hachtroudi's The Twelth Imam's A Woman?, about her return to Iran after thirty years in exile.
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