Ebook: Vis & Ramin

Mobad then bribes Shahru to hand Vis over to him. Mobad's brother Ramin escorts Vis to her new husband and falls in love with her on the way. Vis has no love for Mobad and turns to her old nurse for help ... Told in language that is lush, sensual and highly inventive, VIS AND RAMIN is a masterpiece of psychological perceptiveness and characterization. Shahru is worldly and venal, the nurse resourceful and amoral (she will immediately remind Western readers of the nurse in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), Vis high-spirited and determined, Ramin impetuous and volatile. The hopeless psychological situation of Vis' husband, Mobad, flickers wearily from patience to self-assertion to fury and back again. The origins of VIS AND RAMIN are obscure. The story dates from the time of the Parthians (who ruled Persia from the third century BCE to the third century CE), and certainly existed in oral and perhaps written form before the eleventh century Persian poet Fakhraddin Gorgani composed the version that has come down to us.