Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Imagine the churchiest dean of students from the primmest girls’ college of the 1950s elevated to the post of absolute dictator, and you have some idea of the Iran that Shahriar Mandanipour brings slyly alive in his novel “Censoring an Iranian Love Story.”

As he presents it, Iran is a country so obsessed with eradicating provocations to sin (music, dancing, unchaperoned conversation) that it has stamped out life.

Mandanipour, an alternately celebrated and suppressed Iranian writer of short stories and novels as well as a film critic, has been in the United States since 2006; this is his first full-length work to appear in English. (The excellent translator is Sara Khalili.) As a droll, even cheerful portrait of totalitarian craziness, it unfolds under the star of a book to which Mandanipour refers more than once: Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

Like Kundera’s novel, “Censoring an Iranian Love Story” takes place on two planes. The first is the simple, sad love story itself. The smitten young lover, Dara, is a former political prisoner who has been denied his degree and shut out of his chosen field, cinema; he ekes out a living painting houses. (Kundera’s persecuted surgeon, Tomas, becomes a window washer.) Dara has no future; meanwhile, Sara, the smart, beautiful girl he loves, is being simultaneously pursued by a government-approved billionaire.

Second, there’s the essay level, on which the author talks directly to his readers about Iranian history and hypocrisy, the problems the plot is giving him and, especially, the headache of getting his sentences around the censor.

Self-Censorship

These two components are printed in different typefaces, with a third element making the pages even weirder to behold: The author keeps deleting words and phrases he thinks won’t pass, but they remain in type with a strikeout through them.

While all these postmodern antics are devious and engaging, the book isn’t an unmixed triumph. It doesn’t help any novel for its structure to keep calling to mind Kundera’s masterpiece, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. And the narrative tradition from which Mandanipour emerges puts him at a further disadvantage to Kundera.

Both novelists are drunk on literature, stuffing their prose with references to favorite books (and music and movies). But while Mandanipour is conversant with everyone from Dostoyevsky to Danielle Steel, he’s also in love with the Iranian tradition of the parable -- which, whatever its virtues, does little to deepen and complicate character. Ultimately his novel goes out of balance, with the narrator taking over and the lovers fading into types.

‘Unbearable’ Optimism

The difference between the writers’ societies also works against Mandanipour. Compared with his Iran, Kundera’s Czechoslovakia is an almost rational place. At least, it’s one where pleasure is still possible, and as a result “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” has a sneaky optimism.

When Kundera’s womanizing doctor, Tomas, is forced to wash windows, after his initial shock he finds that his new life is like “a long holiday ... filled with new salesgirls, housewives, and female functionaries, each of whom represented a potential erotic engagement.” Tomas is a kind of life force the state can harass but not defeat.

Chaste and pathetic Dara, on the other hand, is defeated from the moment we lay eyes on him. The reader has every reason to feel ambivalent about his pursuit of Sara, since the life he offers her is a grim one. Mandanipour’s ironic, even jaunty tone dances on the rim of despair -- not least, I imagine, because he knows how slim a chance his very fine novel has of ever being published in Iran.

“Censoring an Iranian Love Story” is published by Knopf (295 pages, $25).

(Craig Seligman is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Craig Seligman at cseligman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 7, 2009 00:01 EDT