A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

I was hoping A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea would be an exploration of the relationship of twin sisters and the grief of losing one another. The idea of a young Iranian girl coping with her grief through her imagination and stories, after her twin sister, Mahtab, and her mother supposedly disappear, intrigued me. Saba invents stories about her sister's life in America, believing that being a twin must mean her sister is alive and that lives will remain linked, no matter how much earth and sea separates them.

Unfortunately, this plot seems to have been more of a sub-plot, never the main focus of the narrative as a whole. Even worse, I can't work out what was the focus of the novel. It's more like Nayeri had several different ideas and plots in mind, and instead of focussing on one, she combined all of them into one novel. The only way all these different sub-plots are linked together is that they are vaguely related to Saba. And none of them were strong enough the carry the whole novel. I can't help thinking that Nayeri should have chosen one relationship and plot to focus on.

I wish that relationship was Saba and Mahtab's, which we learn very little about. As it is Mahtab is nothing more than a plot device. Mahtab's fantastical parallel life is so obviously untrue, that there is no real faith behind it. It's clear to everyone (including Saba, I think) right from the start know that Mahtab is long dead. These sequences are superficial and also feel overly long. They drag and I found myself wanting to skim them, because they revealed nothing about Saba, her grief process or the development of the plot, especially when she's started her adult life and so much else happens to her. It's inconceivable that she would continue to believe in this elaborate fantasy for so long.

Even though I felt the novel failed to explore the relationships of the characters, there was still another seemingly important theme: the conflict of a wealthy Christian family attempting to live in rural Islamic village in post-revolutionary Iran. Unfortunately, this was another theme I felt wasn't sufficiently explored. Sure, there was the initial disappearance of the mother (which may or may not have been related to her religion), the difficulties of women living in a highly patriarchal society, two horrific assaults, and an execution of a character Saba has never even met, but other than that village life barely changes after the revolution and the Christian family seems to face surprisingly little resistance from the rest of the villagers. It's like the author suddenly realised the family had it too easy, so added in the assaults/execution to add to the conflict of this theme, and then went back to focussing on other themes. In fact, Nayeri even mentions in the author's note at the end that it would be “uncommon” to have “a prominent Christian family living mostly unbothered in a village” in Iran, but that she chose to ignore these “details”. I don't really understand why she would have decided it important to make the family Christian, if she wasn't interested in exploring this theme? This is another side of the novel that felt unfinished.

I'm sadly left feeling this was an unremarkable read that didn't realise it's potential. Perhaps if Nayeri had tried to find more of a focus, then the novel would have felt more complete.