While in classical Persian literature one finds poems in praise of cities, in modern Persian literature, and specifically modern Persian fiction, we find merely a few cities in Iran that are indirectly and implicitly portrayed in novels and short stories, and still fewer that appear as the main character. Hossein Atashparvar’s From the Moon to the Well, however, is a rare example of a novel in which a city, the city of Mashhad, is the main character. It is in fact a unique story, one in which the author/narrator is on a quest to find the city in which he has lived nearly all of his life but which seems to have disappeared, changed, or been mutilated before his own eyes.

The first-person narrator of From the Moon to the Well is a writer whose name is the same as that of the author. He is planning to write a story for which he needs a street in Mashhad as its locale, a street that symbolizes Mashhad. For this purpose, he goes to a real estate agency to ask which one of the famous streets in Mashhad symbolizes the city. His quest, however, is in vain. He cannot find one street that symbolizes Mashhad any longer. “A street that symbolizes Mashhad,” according to the narrator, “must have signs of a generation, a history, and a culture, or leave behind the legacy of memories, even for that generation.”