48 pages • 1-hour read
The Stationery Shop
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Symbols & Motifs
The Stationery Shop
Symbolizing love, the Stationery Shop is the physical location where Roya Archer and Bahman Aslan’s romance begins. Mr. Ali Fakhri, who owns the shop, originally opened it “to help the young,” making “it a priority to carry books as much as stationery” so that young lovers could hide messages to each other between their covers (301): “This shop—this haven—has saved him” (300), giving him meaning and purpose, while offering young lovers a sense of possibility and hope.
Bahman becomes attached to the shop after his mother, Badri Aslan, starts taking him there as a young boy. Mr. Fakhri begins investing in Bahman’s literary education because he’s still in love with Badri. When he discovers that Bahman and Roya are interested in each other, Mr. Fakhri encourages their romantic connection, helping them pass love letters to one another in his books at the shop and urging the two teens to be together by befriending each of them.
Roya is attached to the shop because it offers her an escape from her city’s constant political turmoil. She often goes there after school, “running her fingers over tablets of smooth pages” (18), smelling pencils, and studying “fountain pens and ink bottles or flipping through books that [speak] of poetry and love and loss” (18). The place offers her a sense of calm she can’t find anywhere else. It becomes even more meaningful to her after she and Bahman meet there, connecting over their shared love of poetry. They start coming to the shop to see each other.
Years later, Roya is reminded of her deep love for Bahman as a young girl when she encounters his son’s stationery shop in the US. The shop reminds her of her home country and her first love, immersing her in the sights and smells of her past. Bahman’s attachment to Mr. Fakhri’s shop inspired this second stationery store, where he tried to recreate the original beloved store. In these ways, the Stationery Shop thematically supports The Persistent Power of Love and thus love’s ability to survive time, space, and life’s trials.
Letters
The letters that Bahman and Roya write to each other symbolize both connection and the past. These epistolary accounts pepper the text, conveying Bahman’s longstanding attachment to Roya. Though decades have passed since their love affair, Bahman hasn’t forgotten Roya. In these notes, he tells her the details of his life in Iran, remarks on their past together, alludes to his heartbreak over their separation, and asks her questions about her new life in the US. His “dispatches” enact his ongoing connection to Roya despite all that has transpired since 1953.
Roya’s letters, which Bahman leaves for her after he dies, likewise reiterate the characters’ indelible connection. Mementos of their past life together, “[t]hese were the letters she had written to Bahman in the summer of 1953. These were the contents of her heart” (294). Roya immediately recalls the girl she once was when she opens the cookie tin containing the letters. The letters tie her to her past life, but they don’t weigh her down the way her memories once did. She can open the tin, revisit the letters, and then close the lid of the tin and set her past aside.
Food
Throughout the novel, references to and images of food symbolize Roya’s cultural identities. After she moves to the US, she has difficulty adjusting to American cuisine: “[C]hicken was rubbery, meat occasionally pink, potatoes mashed into a puree” (182). Although such foods don’t appeal to Roya, she doesn’t want to refuse them because she fears being “rude and ungrateful”; still, she “miss[es] Persian food every day” (182). Roya’s relationships with American and Persian cuisine reflect her regard for each culture. After moving to the US, she tries to forget her life in Iran and to adopt a new lifestyle in her new country. Despite these attempts to assimilate, however, she doesn’t care for life in the US, much like she doesn’t care for American food. She longs for life in Iran and longs to eat Persian food. Roya’s later investment in cooking Persian dishes and teaching her new American compatriots her favorite recipes conveys her work to reconcile these competing identities. Throughout the novel, the author uses these culinary references to reify the theme of The Struggle to Shape Identity Across Cultures.
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