Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s moral universe is not raw, but sore. In his fictional Iranian village, the archetypal human stories are not fresh, but worn out. It is the end of the past in this forgotten corner of pre-Revolutionary Iran. Mechanization is coming, community is dying. Love, once exploited, has now become a mean animal.

The American publishers of Mr. Dowlatabadi’s “Missing Soluch” (Melville House, 507 pages, $16.95), originally published in 1979, present the book as a landmark of Iranian literature, “the first ever written in the everyday language of the Iranian people.” Whether that is a question of dialect or tone, it’s clear that Mr. Dowlatabadi approaches the world of his own childhood — he grew up in the village of Dowlatabad in northeastern Iran — with unsentimental respect. “Missing Soluch,” in the violence and the unceasing vicissitudes of its agrarian plot, brings “East of Eden” to mind, but has none of Steinbeck’s teacherly symbolism.

Soluch, of the book’s title, is an absentee father. His wife, the heroic Mergan, wakes up one morning to find him gone. Poverty has already depleted their love: “Without work there’s no pleasure, and without pleasure, no love.” Extreme poverty has made Mergan’s already impoverished life deeply strange:

Mergan’s lips had been sewn shut by invisible hands. Only her eyes remained open. Her eyes were wide open as if she were in shock. As if the very walls astonished her. … As if the fact that she had a mother who had given birth to her, suckled her, and had raised her was astonishing and terrifying. Was it true? Could it be possible? What a strange, incredible world.

Mr. Dowlatabadi’s exaggerative sentences fall together to create a solid psychological portrait. Mergan can only feel kind in her calmest moments: “Then, it was as if a calm sea had handed her a pearl, the pearl of kindness.”

While Mergan carries on, her now fatherless sons fight and seethe, hardly mentioning their father. In the initial chapters, their violence seems monumental; but in the course of the book, beating a camel or a little brother becomes commonplace. Indeed, one of the most convincing dynamics of Mr. Dowlatabadi’s writing is the way the brothers live through their own violence, acting like Cain and Abel in one chapter and calmly discussing their plans for the future in the next.

While the boys wrestle with themselves, the older men of the village move in on Mergan and her daughter. Abrau, the younger and wiser of the two brothers, only belatedly comes to understand his mother’s situation, and then his understanding is expressed in terms of pain: “It wasn’t just a kind of pain. It was something living, something that had been born within Abrau’s soul, and was always with him.”

When Karbalai Doshanbeh, a creepy village elder, tells Mergan that her husband’s extended absence represents a de facto divorce under Islamic law, Mergan feels as if Karbalai “had released a bag of poison in Mergan’s heart.” And Karbalai himself suffers when he sees how the younger men of the village are outmaneuvering him. He “began to feel as if he had been stung; he felt a burning sensation on the leathery surface of his heart.” In this book, physical pain is white noise, and psychic pain is the real message.

But “Missing Soluch” is not a horror show. Mr. Dowlatabadi knows a world that has seldom overlapped with the modern novel: We learn about a bare economy consisting of firewood, flour, and the resultant bread, with the possibility of water or molasses as bread-softeners. Mergan works as a gleaner, a milkmaid, a delouser, a white-washer, and a nurse. Her one-room home is kept bare of crumbs, and the length of “Missing Soluch” is justified by the expansive emptiness of its world.

Even metaphors are hard to come by: Mergan reuses the land again and again as she thinks about her heart. When Soluch leaves, “A rough farmer was ploughing her heart with his ploughshare. To the very roots!” And later, after being raped, when she is contemplating her own sexual future: “They’ve ploughed you and pillaged you, oh earth. But you are both the land and the land’s protector, the guardian of the land. And the land and its guardian are two different things.”

Color is almost never mentioned in this book. Characters understand themselves only through metaphor; they do not analyze. The many disputes that the reader, in his helpless alien interest, would resolve by talking about people’s feelings, remain mute. At the end of the book, after a vision of Soluch covered in blood under a shroud, we read the last sentence: “The night was breaking on the trail of blood.” Perhaps its red will be visible, and Mergan’s pain will become manageable. What makes this book stirring is the way Mr. Dowlatabadi has limited his palette, self-consciously but realistically, as only a modern would.

blytal@nysun.com