In 1974, I was working at a bookstore in Eagle Rock, California. In the fall of the previous year, I had started a PhD program in English at Claremont Graduate School. Improbably, it was the fourth grad program in which I had been enrolled—a little like having been married four times by the age of 25. Living in South Pasadena while attending classes in Claremont, I had taken a part-time job at the bookstore, a branch of a venerable Pasadena institution, Vroman's, where I had spent many hours (and many dollars) as a customer. The Eagle Rock store was located in a brand-new mall (this was the heyday of malls). Soon they were asking me to work full time. Within several months, I withdrew from Claremont.

One of the inducements of working at Vroman's was the 40 percent discount on books. The main store—which still exists today, on Colorado Boulevard—featured an excellent selection of new fiction. I was browsing there one day in 1974 when a book with a strange title caught my eye: Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai. From my point of view, the novel had a couple of strikes against it. I looked cautiously at the inside flap (sometimes jacket copy reveals too much ahead of time) and saw that the book (the author's first novel) was described as "a brilliant self-contained reflection of schizophrenia." I generally avoid books and movies about mental illness. The reality of it is terribly dreary, and imaginative treatments of the subject (so I thought, and still feel) are almost always loaded with false emotion. Then there was the cover art, a reproduction of Magritte's The Lovers. On the other hand, the information about the author was intriguing:

A. G. Mojtabai was born in Brooklyn in 1937. She graduated from Antioch College in 1958 with a B.A. in philosophy and a minor in mathematics.

Soon after graduation, Ms. Mojtabai married and moved to Iran, where she lived with her husband in a large, extended family. They later moved to Karachi, Pakistan, and then to Lahore.

When ...

Christopher Benson(Registered User)

July 12, 2011  5:21pm

**Improbably, it was the fourth grad program in which I had been enrolled.** John: What were the previous three grad programs? Was your goal to become a professor of English? **I had taken a part-time job at the bookstore, a branch of a venerable Pasadena institution, Vroman's...** I have some friends who live in Pasadena and they introduced me to another venerable Pasadena institution, The Archives Bookstore on East Washington Boulevard.

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