In the mid 1960s, the introduction of land reform caused the collapse of feudalism in Iran; it later led to the exodus of workers from rural to urban areas. This period marks the emergence of a new literary trend, adabiyat-i rusta’i, a body of literature primarily concerned with rural Iran. Hasan Abedini, the author of A Century of Fiction Writing in Iran, writes, “Tehran could no longer represent the country; therefore novelists began to pay closer attention to other regions outside the capital.” Set in Zaminej, a fictitious village, Ja-yi khali-i Suluch [Missing Soluch], a novel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (b.1940), exemplifies this literary shift. It closely portrays the period’s transformative events of social and political import. The novel takes us into the life Mergan and her three children as they have been forced to cope with the sudden disappearance of Soluch, the family’s breadwinner. Through mapping absence in the novel, I wish to trace the implications of land reform on the cultural, social and political life of Zaminej. Mapping the text makes visible the destructive impact of Soluch’s absence--physical, emotional and economical--on his family’s rapidly-changing relationship with land, power and people. Through diagrams that elucidate the changes in novel's key relationships, we can most clearly see how Missing Soluch captures the catastrophic aspect of rapid modernization, poorly planned and hastily implemented by the central power, that leaves the countryside with growing class disparity and the migration of its workforce.