Uncle Napoleon’s mania is an extreme and comic exaggeration of a common phenomenon in Iranian culture, but not all of his accusations are baseless. Like the best satire, there is something poignant about the mockery. Uncle Napoleon emerges as despotic and absurd, but also vulnerable and almost tragic. By blaming his troubles on an all-powerful entity, he makes himself indispensable: The bigger the enemy the greater his own significance. When he is featured, he strikes a pathetic character: A small-minded and incompetent patriarch who responds to failures in real life by fantasizing that he is a Napoleon figure. Uncle Napoleon is among those hindering the narrator’s triste with Layli, but he is not always the focus of the book. The book does a fair amount of meandering and some parts drag over the course 500 pages, but on the whole there are enough genuinely funny episodes to keep things ticking along.

His obsession fuels his investigations into the actions of other family members, and in the best romantic tradition his passion only ends up leading to bitterness and longing. The mayhem of events centers on a traditional love story, describing the narrator’s account of trying to woo his uncle’s daughter Layli. Uncle Napoleons hold some of the highest offices in the country.Īs a novel, “My Uncle Napoleon” is full of farcical exaggeration. Shady plots certainly abound, but leading figures and media outlets of all political stripes routinely resort to cynical conspiracy theories to explain away their misdeeds. But it is useful to read “My Uncle Napoleon” in today’s Turkey, where Uncle Napoleonism is alive and well. Satire is among the most culturally and historically specific of literary genres, and it tends to have the shortest shelf life. But the pathology it describes continues to have a tenacious hold - not just in Iran. It sold millions of copies and became a hit TV series before being banned after the Islamic revolution in 1979. Iraj Pezeshkzad’s 1973 comic novel “My Uncle Napoleon” fictionalized this paranoia, telling the story of a tyrannical and deranged uncle who hero-worships Napoleon Bonaparte and lords it over his extended family. “Uncle Napoleon” is a phrase used in Iran to refer to a belief that foreign plots, particularly British, lurk behind all bad events.

Napoleon syndrome