Themes in the House of Sand and Fog

The following is excerpted and modified from Book Rags- Guide to the House of Sand and Fog and is being used as a secondary source for educational purposes.

The House of Sand and Fog draws from classical and Shakespearean tragedy.

Hamlet- “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The story begins with Hamlet’s uncle poisoning the King in order to
marry his wife and take over the throne. His father’s ghost appears to him and tells him he must avenge his death and set things to rights.
Kathy loses her father’s home due to a bureaucratic error that should have never occurred and should have easily been rectified. Things are not as they should be in the modern state of California. Note that Corona means crown in Spanish.
Behrani, a once powerful officer in the Shah’s employment is forced to flee for his life when the revolution totally changes the country into a theocracy. Far from being just, the ruling sect does away with all aspects of religious toleration and executes those who dare to protest.

Appearances and Realities
1.The novel begins with Behrani living a double life: he leaves home well dressed-then changes clothes and goes to work picking up trash for the Highway Department by day, acting as a convenience store clerk by night...then he changes back and returns home well dressed. He is challenged by the desk clerk at the hotel where he parks his expensive Buick because he enters the hotel in work clothes. No one challenges his right to be there once he has changed his clothing. Behrani clearly puts great stock in outward appearances.
2.His wife Nadi thinks that maintaining the appearance of wealth is essential to their daughter's finding a wealthy husband (indeed, such a marriage occurred shortly before the novel begins). Their expensive apartment is decorated in much the same manner as their home in Iran.
3.Kathy also tries to keep up appearances by not telling her mother that Nick has left her, pretending that everything is fine, which in a way she thinks it is, when she and Lester fall in love-but things are certainly not all right in the way she leads her mother to believe. Kathy goes out of her way to keep her mother from finding out the truth ..with a fictional earthquake that leaves the phone lines out

4. Appearances are also changed by the fog, which obscures even the most familiar objects close at hand, and comes and goes independent of human activity.
5. Appearances are also masked or changed when Nadereh, Behrani notices, starts using cosmetics again after moving out of the $3,000-per-month Berkeley apartment into the more ordinary Corona house.

6 And Kathy, when her eyes look strained from lack of sleep, applies a little eyeliner to disguise her tiredness.
7 Kathy’s mood is modified by her drug of choice- when she feels the least bit upset she smokes heavily. Breaking her sobriety when she meet Lester, she relies on alcohol to deal with stress. In the past Kathy relied on coke.- ironically, it its Lester who plants coke to trap a man who he suspects of abusing his wife. Behrani uses vodka to escape reality..something that would be forbidden to a Muslim.


At one point, Kathy appears to be dead after Behrani chokes her and drags what he thinks is her lifeless body into her car.
.The cruelest illusion, though, occurs near the end of the novel, after Lester, Esmail, and Behrani have left the white car and are walking toward the tax office: Esmail grabs Lester's gun and Behrani yells for someone to call the police; the police are summoned and they subsequently shoot and kill "the gunman," Esmail. Only Lester had known that the gun was not loaded. Thus, Esmail dies for nothing.
The American Dream and the Westward Migration
1 Kathy Nicolo's father, a man born of an Italian immigrant family, ran a linen business on the east coast of the U.S. He left Kathy and Frank a house in on its west coast.
2Kathy and her new husband Nick travel west in their Bonneville (as an interesting sidenote, a Captain James Bonneville was used by one of the first explorers of the U.S. Rocky Mountain West).
3 Kathy and Nick migrate to their new west coast home, making the crossing in a one-week nonstop trip. Kathy's memory of the trip is somewhat blurred-for example, when she imagines that the car was on cruise-control the entire trip (cars, of course, kick out of cruise-or burn up their motors-going up steep hills, like the Rocky Mountains).
4 Massoud Behrani had also migrated west. The first part of his journey was in a bulletproof limousine through the back alleys of the burning streets to his military base, where, as planned, his copilot had the engines of the plane they were going to steal already turned on.
Behrani flies west first to Bahrain, then Paris, and, finally, California.