Inspiration Information: “The Last Illusion”

The fifth in a series of posts in which we ask writers about the cultural influences on their work.

My second novel, “The Last Illusion,” is made up, quite simply, of two basic elements: myth plus imagination. It’s based on a short tale within a fifty-thousand-couplet-long medieval Persian epic, “The Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings”: the chronicle of Zal, a boy who was abandoned by his royal family, owing to his albino looks, and left to be raised by a colossal mythical bird, Simurgh. I attempted a modern retelling, with my bird boy coming of age in New York in the Y2K to 9/11 era. This was the N.Y.C. of my own coming of age: a setting of gestating danger and unflinching tension, a time when the scope of neurotic magical thinking rivaled the enormity of actual impending disaster.

I had always wanted to write about Zal—since I first heard his story told by my father at bedtime. I was a child of six, a new immigrant to America from Iran, still trying to bridge the old world with the new and latching on to the ultimate outsider parable. But it wasn’t until I stumbled on news reports of “real” feral children—which inevitably cause controversy, and which many people believe to be hoaxes—that I found a way to contextualize the Zal of legend, to make him a feral child of our world. I learned about a 2008 case, a seven-year-old boy who was found in an aviary in rural Russia. A piece in the Daily Mail about him was extraordinary: his mother “had her own domestic birds and fed wild ones. [She] neither beat him nor left him without food. She just never talked to him. It was all the birds that communicated with the boy and taught him birds’ language. He just chirps and when realizing that he is not understood, starts to wave hands in the way birds winnow wings.” This immediately conjured the Zal of my fantasies.

As I started reading more stories online about feral children—a boy raised by wolves who walked around on all fours; a woman who was found wandering jungles naked, who had lived among wild animals since she was a small child—I first encountered the term “Mowgli syndrome” which made me return to the beloved “Jungle Book” of my youth. I had fallen in love with Kipling very shortly after learning English as a child. I loved the tale of Mowgli, the human who was raised by wolves, a bear, and a panther. I loved how things became most difficult for him when trying to relate to human life. This sort of story, where the outsider—the freak, the oddity, the beast—saw the truth better than anyone around him, moved me. On American playgrounds, one after another, I spent every spare moment hiding from the other children and filling my brain with stories to pass the time, as I had lost a sense of myself not only as an Iranian girl but as a human of any nationality. I simply could not come to a place of comfort within my own skin in America, and so my interior world became essential. This feeling colored the psyches of all the freaks and outsiders who populate “The Last Illusion”—character and story emerged organically out of an autobiographical anguish.

Plot is easy to feed, but how does one nourish ambience, mood, atmospherics? Style has always been as important to me as substance. Robert Penn Warren’s 1969 poetic sequence “Audubon: A Vision” became a key inspiration for the book for those reasons. It was a text I’d been introduced to in graduate school, which the Southern poet Dave Smith had passed onto us in a contemporary poetry seminar, a personal favorite of his. For some reason, that winter in Baltimore, nothing spoke to me more. Its dark apocalyptic ambience, its unearthly syntax and diction—plus its central theme, of the dilemma for an artist who must kill his subjects in order to portray them—gave Zal’s journey an aesthetic texture. Suddenly the book was a thing of black glitter, sequins in tar, its dark shining surface a reflection of its wildly tragicomic spirit, recalling the world of the Latin American fabulists I came of age loving.

I can’t say that Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, José Donoso, and Clarice Lispector directly influenced anything in the book—but I was haunted by the way that they regarded their own eccentric visions with an almost mystical reverence. I also kept Borges close by—his obsession with the many dimensions in a story gave me courage. During this period, I also began teaching American experimental literature—which seemed influenced by the Latin American school—and it was through David Markson, Lydia Davis, Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, and many other innovators in fiction that I kept faith that the strangeness of the book would in the end only help it find its audience.

There is another important thread in the book: the portrait of an illusionist called Bran Silber, who befriends Zal. Silber is a flamboyant personality based on David Copperfield; his “last illusion” before he retired was modelled on a Copperfield act that I had seen on television as a child, the 1983 Statue of Liberty vanishing act. With two scaffolding towers on Liberty Island, a single helicopter granting an aerial view of the act, and a live audience two hundred feet from the statue, Copperfield dropped a giant curtain to show search lights passing through empty space where the statue was; it was act of smoke and mirrors indeed, with a nice helping of light and rotation, and it became Copperfield’s most successful illusion for much of his career. I had never forgotten it or my horror of watching it: as a new immigrant, I did not understand what erasing a giant symbol of America, Lady Liberty, could mean. In my book, Silber’s “last illusion” is making the World Trade Center vanish; only when I inserted it into a world nearly two decades further along, then suddenly some meaning fell into place for me.

In the end, the greatest inspiration for the book is something I have kept largely buried. It’s the longing for a homeland I left behind decades ago, one that I never got to know. Zal is an outsider to the human world because he is without roots, which I merely hyperbolize to mean human existence. He is not just a “resident alien,” as I was with my green card until 2001, but almost a real alien. He feels his humanness to be completely artificial. There is a reason my father and mother constantly spoke of the glories of the Persian empire, discussed ancient Persia like it was just a generation before—because when one is dealing with loss of ethnic and cultural identity, there is no limit to how far back the narrative can take you. The Iran of the Revolution was no longer theirs, nothing like the Iran they knew. Their Iran was one of wealth, perhaps idiot idealism, incomparable pride and power—not unlike the sprawling imperial dynasty that ruled the civilized world for centuries, and not even unlike the America of the Y2K era. This is where you come from, they’d remind me; these are your people, my father would say on those sleepless nights when he’d read and reread “The Shahnameh.”

Please read that one more time, I’d beg, flipping to the Zal sections.

It’s late, he’d say. It’s here, we can always come back to it tomorrow.

But somehow, as much as it happened over and over, I never believed that.

These are your people, he said, but he should have said, This your Zal. I’m now living in the tomorrow of my father’s promise—I’ve made Zal mine, and we’re now bound together in the pages of a book.

Porochista Khakpour is the author of the novels “Sons and Other Flammable Objects” and “The Last Illusion.”

Top: Simurgh, in “The Shahnameh,” takes Zal back to its nest. Middle: Mowgli and Baloo in the 1895 edition of “The Two Jungle Books.” Illustration by John Lockwood Kipling. Bottom: “Zal Questions Sam’s Intentions Regarding the House of Mihrab,” from “The Shahnameh.” Illustration courtesy Gift of Arthur A. Houghton Jr./MET.