Considered Hushang Golshiri’s magnum opus and the culmination of all his work in terms of his worldview and more importantly his vision of art and creativity, Book of Jinn is a masterpiece of Persian fiction that has been compares with James Joyce's Ulysses in terms of its sophisticated use of language, colorful characters, a work in which even a city and its culture as a whole are presented as a character; Golshiri's Isfahan of Book of Jinn emulates Joyce's Dublin in his novel. The dominance of tradition, especially religious beliefs mingled with folkloric superstition, is evident in both novels, in which in the Irish writer's work Catholicism permeates and in the Persian writer's work, Shi'ism casts a strong shadow on all aspects of life
Book of Jinn is a magical novel. It begins with the narrative of the childhood of its protagonist, Hoseyn, in the relatively newly-established city of Abadan, in a working-class neighborhood made of small ramshackle concrete houses, a small modern jungle created in the shadows of oil refinery smokestacks, a workers' ghetto reminiscent of many such neighborhoods in various parts of the world with hurriedly-constructed dwellings, common especially in the first part of the 20th century. However, after fewer than 80 pages, the locale of the story moves to the city of Isfahan, with its old clay and mud brick houses, narrow twisting alleys covered with arched roofs, old fashioned and traditional people, and the magical heavy presence of thousands of years of history and superstitious beliefs weighing on the shoulders of its inhabitants. This is a city that entices and finally possesses the teenager who has returned to his ancestral home. Book of Jinn, although a magical novel, is written in an incredibly realistic style. And even though it is magical, it is not magical realism in the conventional sense of the term. Its characters are tangible and familiar to the reader, as close as the members of his or her own family; but they are at the same time distant and inscrutable. It is the story of a city, a culture, and a people undergoing transition and change because of all that modern life has imposed on them: political upheavals, revolutions, and social and cultural instability. The narrator, in fact, is awed and even alarmed by this change and makes every effort to the best of his ability to keep the ground stable under his own feet. In contrast to his brother, Hasan, a teacher and political activist who wants to change the world, and who constantly moves from village to village and town to town, first as a teacher and then as a political prisoner, Hoseyn wants to keep the world as it is, or rather as it was, by searching for and securing a small corner in it and stopping the world, his world, from revolving and changing. When Hasan criticizes him for living in the past and declares that one should set the foundations for the future, Hoseyn responds: “I am afraid of your future. In that past, at least everything had its own place, and one also would know human worth.”