Only This Beautiful Moment: a story in three

 

 

Only This Beautiful Moment is now my third Abdi Nazemian book, I believe. The other two that I’ve read so far have both had this very specific vibe to them, and I don’t know what it is. They’ve both been very sure of themselves, I feel. I picked this one up from Gay’s the Word in London after seeing Nazemian’s name on the front of it and figured I’d end up wanting to read it. I’ve personally been horrendous in keeping up with what books have been coming out, so I rarely know when even an author I love has something coming out.

The blurbiana grande says 2019, Moud is an out gay teen living in Los Angeles with his distant father, Saeed. On a visit to see his grandfather, Bobby, in Iran, the revelation of family secrets with force Moud into a new understanding of his history, his culture, and himself. 1978, Saeed is an engineering student with a promising future ahead of him in Tehran. But when his parents discover his involvement in the country’s burgeoning revolution, they send him to safety in America, a country Saeed despises, where he’s forced to live with the American grandmother he never knew existed. 1939, Bobby, the son of a calculating Hollywood stage mother, lands a coveted MGM studio contract. But the fairy-tale world of glamour he’s thrust into has a dark side…

We open on Moud wiping his social media feed because he’s scared that Iran will find his gay presence online, but at the time he’s doing this, he mentions how liberated he feels as he never cared about social media that much in the first place. At the same time, he’s worrying his boyfriend, Shane, is the opposite of him and just so loud about everything. However, Moud is going to visit his Baba in Tehran – and I’m absolutely obsessed with Baba Bobby since one of his requests is a whole ass iPad. Camp. The book pops over to Moud’s dad, Saeed, who goes out to this protest where he meets this girl, Shirin, and since he was so closed off as a person during Moud’s first chapter, I was wondering whether we’d get to find out just what it was that made him the man he was, considering what he was like during his own chapters. Then to Bobby, he’s in love with this guy, Vicente, who is on his tennis team, only to be interrupted by his momager who drags him to a screen test, only after telling him his dog died, so that he can cry. He ends his first chapter by saying he wants a family that love each other.

I won’t lie, part way through the book, I definitely was rooting for Moud and Shane to break up. He never listened, like really listened to Moud. Given that Shane is white, he would never truly understand the things that Moud was seeing and experience as someone in Tehran and as a Persian. Shane was very much that typical White Gay who has a lot to say, yet somehow is never saying or doing anything. He very much gave me the kind of gay that would only hang out with straight white girls, and that besides a boyfriend, never had any actual queer friends.

I’ve said this in the past when I’ve talked about Nazemian’s writing, how it has a very specific feel to it. It feels languid when I read it. His words feel as though they flow. His words feel like you’re standing there and they float around you. It’s like you see what’s happening, but you’re almost in a daze the whole time. In a strange sense, it makes me feel as though no matter what bad things happen in his books, everything will be alright, and the characters all have hope and even if things aren’t going to be perfect they’ll at least improve.

And speaking of the things happening, given the this was a coming-of-age book, even though things happened at it was the exploration of how each of the men ended up where they ended up (if you ignore Moud, since he’s technically still on his way to wherever he’s going). Like I said prior, I really wanted to find out how and why Saeed ended up the way he did with Moud. There’s a lot of trauma interwoven with the three men, and you do get the answers for more or less everything – I did at least. In that, I think inherently with having three main characters, it ends up meaning that they maybe wouldn’t get as much exploration as, say, a novel with just one main character. I definitely feel like with Moud being closest to the present, in 2019, he was the one that got the most page-time. But considering Saeed and Bobby’s lives, in this context, had both happened, they had been through their events, it made sense to me. Moud was going through his stuff as they were happening, whereas the others’ had already happened. It was also the case where you could at least tell that neither Saeed or Bobby died in their chapters.

If I were to rank the three stories, I’d put them at Moud, Bobby, then Saeed, in order of how much I enjoyed, or found it interesting reading about them. Part of this absolutely just comes down to Saeed being the one I related to the least out of the three (no spoilers lol). With Moud being gay and set in 2019, shockingly, I could relate to that more than Saeed being set in 1978 and Bobby in 1939. For me, books are a form of escapism, and I tend to lean more towards something that’s so obviously fiction. I understand that saying this when talking about this book seems a bit silly, especially given the serious topics covered surrounding Iran in this book. Saying all of that, escapism comes to me in different forms. It doesn’t have to be this dramatic set-up that would never happen in real life, it can simply be seeing someone else – not like me – coming of age in a way, much like Moud. It could also be like Bobby, being in love with his best friend while he was navigating being a rising Hollywood star. It’s why I’ve never really been drawn to non-fiction as a reader. It may also be why I don’t find myself reading a lot of historical books, even if they are fiction (if you ignore what I’ll be posting about next).

Truth be told, for as much that happened between the three men, not much happened, if that makes sense? This book didn’t follow the typical format of build up to major conflict with the attempt to then get it resolved at the end – because for some of them it wasn’t resolved. I still enjoyed this book regardless. It’s not the typical type of thing I read, but I’m glad I did.

Okay, bye.