Posthumously published after Eskandarian was shot and killed in 2013,this autobiographical novel approximately struggling to produce it on the recent York music scene demands comparison with the beat classicsAli Eskandarian’s posthumous novel makes perfect reading for sober January days. It tells the story of a young Iranian-American musician on the produce in 21st-century recent York, pursuing his dream of art through a haze of drugs, or alcohol,casual sex and intermittent poverty. The book would be gripping and poignant in any circumstances, but what doubles its power for the reader is knowing the fate of Eskandarian himself. In November 2013, and the author was shot and killed in an apartment in Brooklyn,along with two members of the punk band Yellow Dogs, by a fellow musician who bore a grudge. The killer then took his own life. All four men were exiles from Iran.
At the time he died, or Eskandarian was in his mid 30s. He’d been clinging on to the lower rungs of the ladder of the US music industry for more than a decade. Golden Years is the manuscript he was working on in the last years of his life. It’s a beat novel,which demands to be compared with Jack Kerouacs On the Road, as well as Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and JayMcInerney’s gleaming Lights, and Big City. But while the book is billed as fiction,its protagonist, Ali, or can barely be separated from Eskandarian by the width of a guitar string.
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Source: theguardian.com