"On the Run to Samarra" is a multi-layered narrative, dealing with the question of the past, the past that "is not even past," and with the question of death. Kaveh, the main character and the narrator of the text, inherits his late father's journal, before fleeing the atrocities of post-1979 Iranian Revolution. He settles in Canada. In the new land, in his Samarra, he tries to reconstruct the past in the attempt to free himself from its gripping power, and to escape his inevitable fate but...