The Present is Forgotten for the Past in "House of Yesterday"
Sara Rahmat is a fifteen-year-old Afghan Uzbek American whose struggle to cope with her parents’ divorce and her grandmother’s dementia has turned her into a reckless, angry person. Sara’s mother, Nargis Amani, sums up how everyone feels about Sara's behavior when she tells her, “I don’t know who you are anymore, who took away my shirin girl.”
Nargis Amani, commonly referred to as Madar, is an entrepreneur who flips homes. The story begins with her decision to bring Sara to the Sumner house, her latest renovation, as a photographer, thinking it’s better to get her daughter out of the house than to let her be sad alone. While snapping pictures of the dilapidated mansion, Sara sees the ghost of her grandmother in her youth. On a following visit, she sees another ghost, this time of a little girl.
Sara becomes preoccupied with uncovering the relationship between the Sumner home, her grandmother, and the girl. She starts making regular late-night visits to the old, black mold-infested house to search for answers. She will stop at nothing to uncover the past. Even as her erratic behavior threatens her relationships with her parents, her cousins, and her best friend, she returns to the old, haunted house.
Alongside the mystery of the house, there are two other subordinate storylines: her parents are getting a divorce and her father has a new love interest. Each of the subordinating branches is weighty and neither is given ample attention. Despite this, the book has many sweet scenes that are emotionally moving. It's also full of descriptions of Afghan Uzbek life, which is wonderful, especially given how little literary representation there is from this viewpoint. The book is a solid read on that point alone.
The description, which is lush at some points, often feels like it could do more. On one of Sara's many visits to the Sumner house, Sara is transported to a moment in the past, and the haunted house becomes a different place. Zargarpur contains the entire transformation in two sentences: “The homes across the street are replaced with a style of home I’ve never seen in person before. Behind them are the shadows of large, looming mountains.” From this minimal description, we assume Sara is somewhere in Afghanistan, a place that her grandmother was in in her youth. Readers are left to fill in the image with whatever knowledge they have of Afghanistan in the 1950s.
In general, the characters are hard to differentiate from each other, which may be another issue of description. It's especially hampering in a story that centers a large family, though it does feel realistic to how Afghan relatives relate to each other--adults and children often don’t interact with each other enough to reveal characteristics that identify them as whole, unique people. You could argue that no one really gets to know anyone else.
Instead of interesting, believable characters, we often get hollow representations that exist to fulfill a role in Sara’s story. The only character for whom this treatment seems acceptable is Bibi jan, the grandmother, whose dementia should account for some loss of personality and presence.
Sara herself, despite being the main character, falls victim to this treatment. She is a relatively ordinary teenager who is defined not by any quality of character but by her heritage and her reckless behavior. As her potential for individuality becomes subsumed by abstract categories of "Afghan Uzbek" and "angry teenager," Sara Rahmat fades from memory. Again, this offers a mirror into a reality in which the refugee or immigrant kid is defined by the uniqueness of their cultural background and isn’t encouraged to further develop a personality. While authentic, it feels dissatisfying in fiction. Rather than reimagining Afghan Uzbek American life, Zargarpur simply reflects it.
Rather than reimagining Afghan Uzbek American life, Zargarpur simply reflects it.
When we finally reach the climax and the haunted house mystery is resolved there is little payoff because the work is not done--all of the characters are ghosts that need reviving.
Rating: ★★
House of Yesterday by Deeba Zargarpur | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) | 2022 | 320 pp. | $9.99