Impressionism as resistance: Pedro Kadivar

How to save one's soul in a world that is falling apart?

Pedro Kadivar, Dernière année au pays natal (Paris: Gallimard, 2026). (quoted as DAP)
Pedro Kadivar, The night is endless. (Bremen: Sujet Verlag, 2023). (quoted as UDN)
Pedro Kadivar, Petit livre des migrations (Paris: Gallimard, 2015). (quoted as PLM)

A teenager stands in the corridor of a high school in Shiraz—we are in Iran, in the autumn of 1982—and looks at the photograph of his dead classmate: a disfigured face, staged as a martyr's icon, framed and hung on the wall like a religious image of the regime. Decades later, in Berlin, this "masque mortuaire" still haunts him—and from this inability to let go, the book is born. Pedro Kadivar's DAP traverses the four seasons of this final school period in Iran—the melancholic, golden autumn of Shiraz, the frozen winter of isolation, a spring full of dangerous hope, a summer of foreboding farewell—and weaves these seasons together like light in an impressionistic painting: not a linear narrative, but a composition of glances, sensory impressions, half-spoken conversations, and secret music. A teenager who listens to propaganda speeches in class while simultaneously learning to see as if in a Monet painting—the light on a wall, a friend's gesture, the cut of a beam of light through dust; who must suppress what he feels, and precisely through this suppression develops an inner life that the regime cannot grasp. Written in French by an author who left Iran at sixteen and now writes in both French and German, this novel is itself an act of twofold uprooting and transformation: the question that drives him—"how can one save one's soul in a world that is falling apart?" ¹ —is not a rhetorical question, but the most urgent question of a survivor, who answers it not philosophically, but aesthetically, through the precision of the remembered, the beauty of the form, and the refusal to forget.

In this novel, impressionism proves to be the true political stance: While the Iranian regime of 1982 produces a visual world of totalization—the disfigured martyr's face in the school corridor, the televised confessions of broken intellectuals, the laments of the propaganda zealots blaring from every loudspeaker—the protagonist cultivates a mode of perception that focuses on the individual, the fleeting, the sensory, and is thus structurally the antithesis of ideological co-optation. A young man practices a silent subversion—not through protest, but through the refusal to see the world as the regime wants it to. Kadivar makes this stance the compositional form of the novel itself, employing not dramatic plot arcs, but rather accumulated moments of perception: The four seasons are not chapters of a political chronicle, but variations of light on the same wound.

DAP is a novel that stands on the threshold between autobiography and art prose, between coming-of-age novel and political testimony, between memoir and poetic self-creation. The novel derives its aesthetic and ethical energy from the tension between two temporal planes—the lived experience of a young person in Shiraz in 1982 and the remembering retrospective of an exile in Berlin "de nos jours"—and makes precisely this rift, this in-between zone, the site of subject formation. Kadivar does not merely write about resistance; through his writing style, he models a form of resistance itself: aesthetic sensitivity as a counterpoint to totalitarian appropriation. This raises several key questions: How does the seasonal structure function as a narrative and semantic principle? What forms of communication are possible under a regime of silence? How is space—Shiras vs. Berlin, private vs. public, inside vs. outside—coded as an expression of states of consciousness? To what extent is the novel an autopoetological reflection on writing as a survival strategy?

Pedro Kadivar He was born in Iran and came to France at the age of sixteen—a biographical rupture that forms the core of his entire oeuvre and is explored in literary form in DAP. Today he lives in Berlin, which transforms his double uprooting into a triple existence between Iran, France, and Germany. Kadivar is both a writer and a theater director; he has been awarded the Prix SACD de la dramaturgie francophone for his dramatic works. His two writing languages ​​are French and German—a bilingualism that is not accidental but rather reflects his migration biography: he acquired French as his first language of exile after arriving in France, and German as his second in Berlin. His novels PLM (2015) and DAP (2026) were first published in French by Gallimard; in addition, he has written a literary study on Marcel Proust (Marcel Proust or Esthétique de l'entre-deux, 2004) – significantly, a study of the “in-between,” which also defines his own work – as well as a Petit traité de l'étranger à l'usage de ceux qui en ont peur (2026). In 2023, he published the novel UDN, illustrated with his own drawings, in German with the Bremen-based Sujet Verlag. The novel explores a love affair between two refugees in contemporary Berlin. Kadivar's work consistently revolves around migration, exile, memory, identity between cultures, the "in-between" as a form of existence – and seeks a form for it that is as fluid as the biography that produced it.

Between autofiction, coming-of-age novel and prose poem

DAP defies easy categorization. The publisher Gallimard releases the book in its prestigious "Blanche" series, traditionally reserved for literary novels of high quality. Indeed, the work shares essential structural features of the classic Bildungsroman: at its core lies the development of a young protagonist, his confrontation with the world, and the formation of his inner life. However, the Bildungsroman of the 18th and 19th centuries relied on a teleological logic of development, on the integration of the individual into society. In Kadivar's novel, this integration is sabotaged from the outset: the society into which the protagonist is to be integrated is that of the regime, and his true education consists of learning not to integrate, of inner resistance, of preserving an autonomous inner life.

At the same time, the novel exhibits pronounced features of autofiction—that genre, canonized in French literature since the 1970s, which blends autobiography and fiction. The Berlin-based narrator, looking back on the year 1982 in Shiraz, is clearly related to the biographical author. Nevertheless, the text maintains a distinct distance from mere mimetic self-representation: the structure is aesthetically crafted, the language literarily condensed, and the memories are not simply recalled, but—as the publisher's blurb emphasizes—"through the overlapping of motifs, just as the light changes throughout the day in Impressionist paintings." ² interwoven and transformed.

On a formal level, the novel approaches the prose poem: the four chapters do not follow a tightly plotted, action-oriented dramaturgy, but rather an associative rhythm of perception. There is no cliffhanger, no climax in the conventional sense. Instead, the text accumulates impressions, moods, sensory details—light, smell, sound, bodily sensations—and achieves intensity through lyrical compression rather than plot tension. Five passages exemplify this: the chapter "L'Été" creates a circular, non-linear temporal structure through serial repetition and varied returns to the same image—"Standing at dawn before the jasmine bushes," "My father stands before the jasmine bushes. Time stands still. Dawn will last an eternity." ³The passage about the painting lesson rhythmically accumulates sensory impressions without any action: “Observing the object, approaching its presence, grasping its volume and colors. Trying to reproduce it in all its nuances. Falling in love with this lifeless, anonymous object. Letting oneself be overwhelmed by it.” ⁴ – short, imperative infinitive sentences that function like verses of an ode to sight. The conclusion of the “Hiver” chapter achieves its intensity through sound imagery and silence: “God hesitates within me. On some nights he undertakes long, silent wanderings there.” ⁵ – a metaphor that is self-sufficient, timeless, and without narrative function. Finally, the novel's ending transforms it – “The image is no longer there […] Now invisible, it will accompany me far from land and continent.” ⁶ – the farewell in an open lyrical image instead of a narrative endpoint: no departure, no train, no farewell, only the disappearance from the wall of that image which had kept everything in motion since the first page.

The seasons of the four parts

The novel's most prominent structural feature is its division into four chapters corresponding to the four seasons. On the simplest level, this corresponds to the 1982/83 school year, which in Iran begins in autumn and ends in summer. More profoundly, however, the seasonal structure points to a cultural code: autumn as a season of farewell and maturation, winter as a season of stagnation and introspection, spring as a time of new beginnings and danger, and summer as climax and conclusion. These connotations are not employed in a naively realistic manner, but rather placed in tension with political and historical reality: in Iran in 1982, there is no political spring; terror is independent of the seasons. Nature and history stand in ironic contradiction. The four chapters/seasons simultaneously structure a maturation curve: from the first confrontation with state violence (autumn) through the internalization of resistance (winter), the formation of belonging and alienation (spring), to the maturation of the awareness of departure (summer). In this context, the seasonal is never merely background, but becomes an articulation of inner states.

Autumn

A teenager stands in the corridor of a high school in Shiraz in the autumn of 1982. The autumn chapter opens the novel with its primal scene and unfolds the basic structure of all impressionistic moments of perception: against the state-staged imagery of death, the protagonist sets an aesthetic of precise observation. The narrator's self is still developing; the Islamic Revolution has permeated the everyday lives of the young people, the war with Iraq is devouring their generation, and the regime stages death as a heroic duty.

The first great space of impressionistic freedom is the walk to school. The twenty minutes between the high school and home are not a transition, but existence itself:

The plane trees flank a space of inner freedom. The acceleration of history – “suddenly the revolution, suddenly the executions” – is contrasted with the slowed, meditative rhythm of walking. The season here represents the inner state – the autumn of both maturity and impending loss.

The painting lessons in the basement of a building in the city center – “îlot souterrain”, an underground island – are the second great space of freedom. Here the protagonist literally learns impressionistic perception, and the poetics of painting culminates in a credo:

This paragraph is the novel's autopoetological reflection: against the regime's images (the martyr's photograph, the propaganda films, the televised confessions), the protagonist sets his own self-made image. The underground studio – “îlot souterrain” – is the counter-space to the public corridor with the martyr's photograph: two images, two worlds, two ways of seeing the world, vie for the protagonist's gaze.

The Cézanne reproduction "Nature morte au panier" in the living room of his parents' house—introduced by his mother's remark, "There's a painting missing in the living room on the left wall"—is another Impressionist focal point. That the protagonist was allowed to choose is not trivial in a household where the father wields authority and in a country where the regime makes all the elections: the Cézanne painting is, from the outset, an object of autonomy. Its full significance unfolds in comparison to the photograph of the martyr—this will be discussed in detail in the later section on Cézanne as a structural center.

Winter

The season of isolation and inner turmoil: The protagonist seeks refuge in literature, music, and imagination. Winter brings an intensification of violence: arrests, the televised confessions of the Toudeh members, the disappearance of his brother.

The still life in its large format—onion, apples, carafe, glasses—becomes the true protagonist of the winter. The protagonist thinks about this image day and night: “I think about this still life day and night. At school, at home, walking, saying collective prayer” (p. 47). The still life is a counter-object: while he physically follows the school's propaganda rituals, his mind is with the apples, the onion, the color value of a shadow. The inner image is the invisible space that the regime cannot enter.

The letters to Van Gogh represent another impressionistic mode of the winter: The protagonist writes regularly to the dead painter, always beginning the letters with "Dear Vincent," and sketches within the text. "More than imitating him, I want to slip into the painter's skin, into the life of his interior" (p. 58). Writing letters to a dead man is a form of communication that, by definition, is uncontrollable, countering the silence of surveillance.

The snow wish passage is pure impressionistic lyricism – the snow does not yet exist, it is wished for:

The white that has not yet fallen is presented in its effect on light, mood, social feeling – a utopia through perception.

The scene of illness culminates in an impressionistic delirium: “I have hallucinations. My dead nature appears to me. I hold pencils in my hand and color” (p. 57). The painting being worked on has sunk so deeply into consciousness that it even populates the dream world. Art and body are inseparable here.

The televised confessions of the Toudeh members constitute a politically precise scene in the novel. The protagonist describes Kianouri's body with the same ekphrastic accuracy with which he describes Cézanne's fruits: “Le corps est replié sur lui-même, les épaules concaves se referment sur la poitrine. La tête penche vers le bas. La voix est cassée, elle a du mal à sortir, elle semble s'opposer à sa propre parole” (p. 59). The speaking voice resists what it must say; it wants to be silent like Cordélia. This is the complete political analysis in a single sentence: The regime forces people to speak against themselves.

Spring

The season of awakening and danger. The opening is a programmatic moment in nature: “Around me, nature is destructive. The opening of spring is irrepressible. It is outside the law. The regime can neither prevent spring nor intercept people’s walks” (p. 79). “It is outside the law”—spring is outside the law. The regime can censor all forms of cultural expression, but it cannot stop the plane trees from budding.

The watercolor technique, which the protagonist learns in spring, demands speed, fluidity, and a relinquishment of control, in contrast to the colored pencils of winter: "One must also be prepared to accept the unexpected, to recognize its value, or even to bring about a catastrophe in order to transform it into a sparkling moment, into a fragment that is more alive than anything else – the beating heart of the picture." ⁷ This is an aesthetic that accepts the uncontrollable – structurally the opposite of the totalitarian will to control.

The discovery of Mondrian – in a small, unassuming picture book – is one of the most exciting moments of the novel because it radicalizes the Impressionist paradigm: Mondrian is searching for the skeleton of nature itself. "His eye sharpens to penetrate reality." ⁸ The protagonist understands Mondrian's abstraction as a consequence of the Impressionist gaze: whoever looks at nature long enough eventually sees its structure. And: "Mondrian leads me into the silence in which one tries to hear something beyond the deafening noise of the present." ⁹ Silence as a mode of perception against the deafening cacophony of noise of the regime.

The wrestling scenes on the school lawn are physically intense moments in the novel—more on this in the later section on desire. The discovery of Hockney—by the brother's friend, who brings the book back from California—marks the culmination of the aesthetic coming-of-age story: “Hockney’s A Bigger Splash is a discovery that fundamentally changes my view of painting. A fusion of abstraction and figuration to capture the presence of feeling.” ¹⁰ “Le présent de la sensation” – that is Kadivar’s definition of the impressionistic moment: the absolute presence of perception.

Summer

The season of farewell. Looking back from present-day Berlin, the older narrator overwrites his childhood memories with a second consciousness: that of the exile, the survivor, the writer.

The father in front of the jasmine bush is the central Impressionist motif of the summer: “My father carefully picks a few of them, puts them in a saucer and places it – after taking two or three to dip into his cup of tea at breakfast – on the living room table, where their fragrance spreads. It is a ritual. A prayer. The only one.” ¹¹ Scent, gesture, time of day, morning light – a completely impressionistic tableau. The season, the morning light, the fragrance of the blossoms open the father for a moment: “His large, strong peasant hands, at dawn against the backdrop of jasmine, are the hands of an angel.” ¹² The impressionistic light changes what it illuminates.

The protagonist's jasmine watercolors represent the culmination of his Impressionist training: "My watercolor will only take me a single morning. It must convey the joy of a spontaneous and loving gesture." ¹³ "Here I exercise my strength to act, here I feel joy, here I breathe with full lungs." ¹⁴ The house is empty, Beethoven is playing, an Iranian singer was heard earlier – the acoustics of the room are themselves an impressionistic tableau.

The final scene at the mill stream with the brother's friend – watercolors outdoors, the old miller, two boys on a wall – is the utopian counter-image to everything that came before: “A remote, little-visited place […] Here, neither war nor the name Khomeini is known […] He never really existed there, he never passed through the gates of this humble elsewhere.” ¹⁵ This is the novel's final, fully impressionistic moment – ​​a place outside of history, outside of the regime.

The novel's ending – the disappearance of the photograph from the school wall, its continued existence as something invisible – is the final impressionistic act: "Now rendered invisible, she will dwell within me, far from land and continent." ¹⁶ The image migrates from the wall into the protagonist's body, from the external world to the internal world. The impressionistic novel has fulfilled its task: it has transformed the regime's image into a private, literary, living one – and thus achieved the salvation of the soul it sought from the very beginning.

The two-part period

The image of the dead schoolmate is not described as forgotten, but as "rangée"—put away, arranged: a precise metaphor for repression without resolution. The image's reappearance is not intentional, but a revolt of the repressed. Berlin exile provides the distance necessary for remembering—and simultaneously makes it unavoidable. The phrase "avec toute ma vie en ce temps" shows that the image stands metonymically for an entire life, the image of the homeland itself.

Kadivar had written his doctoral dissertation on Proust (Marcel Proust or Esthétique de l'entre-deux, 2004). The structure of memory in DAP follows a principle that Proust described in In Search of Lost Time. as he described it as "involuntary memory": not the deliberately summoned, ordered memory, but the unexpected, sensorily triggered return of the past in all its affective density. Proust formulates this principle in The Swann at the famous Madeleine passage, and even more pointedly in a theoretical passage of the last volume. Recovered time:

A similar structure underlies DAP. The Berlin narrator believes he has put the past aside—"proprement, convenablement rangée"—but the image of the dead schoolmate doesn't return on demand; instead, it breaks in unbidden: "cette image me poursuit depuis quelques semaines." It is not a memory of the mind, but a haunting. In this sense, Kadivar's novel is a single, long act of "involuntary memory": the four seasons of the Schiras school year are not reconstructed, but recovered—in the Proustian sense of the word "retrouvé"—through sensory triggers: the scent of jasmine, the light on plane trees, the warmth of a hand. What the madeleine in tea is for Proust, the disfigured face in the corridor is for Kadivar: a sensory object that leaps across decades and brings back the past in its unprocessed fullness. The crucial difference, however, is that Proust's "involuntary memory" is a moment of bliss—the rediscovery of lost time—whereas Kadivar's return is traumatic in nature: the image haunts, it comes not as a gift, but as a visitation. DAP is Proust under the conditions of totalitarianism: involuntary memory here is not an aesthetic salvation, but the very condition under which the work of processing grief can even begin.

The novel operates with two clearly distinct but constantly intertwined narrative strands. The first is the Berlin frame story: A middle-aged man repeatedly returns to the image of the death mask in his memory. ¹⁷The regime turns a young person into a symbol, de-individualizing them, transforming their flesh and face into propaganda. The narrator counters this with the work of memory: he restores the individual, the concrete, the living connection.

The second narrative thread is the embedded narrative of the Schiras school days in four seasonal chapters. The structure of the eternal return to the image of the dead friend – “En revenant sans cesse à ce masque mortuaire” – has a formal counterpart in the narrative gesture: The text circles, does not repeat itself, but circles around. This is a structure of mourning and processing, but also a structural principle of resistance.

DAP has a complex temporal structure. Between the present in Berlin and the past in Schiras lie "some decades." The unusual thing is that this span of time does not appear as an overcoming: the past haunts the narrator. ¹⁸This is the temporal structure of trauma. The novel works with the phenomenological time of memory—not chronological time, but affective, associative time, organized by images and sensory impressions. The decision to tell the story over four seasons instead of weeks or months gives suffering a peculiar dignity: it is human suffering, embedded in the inevitability of nature.

Shiraz and Berlin, public and private

The novel operates with a fundamental spatial duality. On a geographical level: Shiraz in 1982 vs. Berlin today. On a social level: the public space of the school, the street, the mosque vs. the private space of the room, of inner fantasy. On a physical level: the visible, controlled body vs. the invisible, free inner life.

Shiraz is not present as an orientalist backdrop, but as a space of memory, of what is reconstructed in retrospect. The narrator in Berlin knows that memory transforms. And yet, Shiraz is the place where his inner world was formed, that subjective space of resonance which the regime could not reach. Berlin, on the other hand, is the space of the present and of writing: In DAP, Berlin is only mentioned as the place of the work of remembering—the narrator is there, but the book does not show him living there. This omission is significant: It shows that one's true home—even the lost, traumatic one—remains the place that exerted a formative influence.

The school is the central public space: a place of indoctrination, surveillance, but also of clandestine communication and a counter-world. The high school in Shiraz, with its displayed photograph of a martyr, is the paradigmatic space in which state violence is aesthetically staged – and in which the protagonist learns to see beyond this staging.

Speechlessness and appropriation: Characters and communication

The protagonist remains at the center, the focus of perception. The dead schoolmate is the most significant secondary character: by dying, he sets the entire novel in motion. The fact that he cannot speak and that the regime speaks for him—making him a symbol—addresses a fundamental obstacle to communication: the dead man is rendered speechless by state appropriation, doubly killed.

The forms of communication in the novel are shaped by the political atmosphere: public discourse is controlled, propaganda omnipresent. Actual communication takes place in the spaces between – glances, gestures, hints, the silence that speaks louder than words. In totalitarian systems, a counter-language of suggestion, metaphor, and silence develops.

The fact that the novel is written in French—a language that in Shiraz in 1982 was, at best, a foreign language spoken by the educated middle class—is itself a communicative act. It is the language of exile, of distance, of aesthetic processing. Writing about Shiraz in French is a transformation of lived experience into the foreign, the distanced, the literary—at the same time a form of resistance through the appropriation of another cultural tradition. French is not the language of Iran, and precisely for that reason, it is the language in which the Iranian trauma takes shape.

Oblomov as a mirror and counter-image

Ivan Goncharov Oblomov (1859) appears in the spring chapter and accompanies the protagonist as a productive mirror against which he measures his own situation. What fascinates him is the radical nature of Oblomov's passivity: Oblomov rejects the world not out of cowardice, but out of a meditated conviction that inactivity itself is a form of resistance. The protagonist recognizes a kinship—he, too, rejects integration, insisting on an inner space—and at the same time a fundamental difference: Oblomov can afford passivity because he has serfs; the protagonist in Shiraz's 1982 cannot, because passivity here would mean surrender.

The most important lesson is a paradox: precisely because he cannot be Oblomov, he understands more precisely what is possible.

Oblomov and his antagonist Stolz – the restless, active one – form the conceptual pair of opposites that articulates the tension of the entire novel: between inner freedom and external constraint, contemplation and action. The fact that the protagonist ultimately becomes neither Oblomov nor Stolz, but finds a third way – that of aesthetic resistance, of precise observation, of writing – is the novel's true educational achievement.

Subtle desire

The desire between the protagonist and the brother of the "martyr"

Desire is among the most subtle and daring aspects of the novel—precisely because it is never named, never classified, never forced into a category of identity, and thus achieves an intensity that surpasses all explicit eroticism. The central love story of the novel—if one can call it that—is that between the protagonist and the younger brother of his deceased schoolmate. It unfolds over all four seasons: approach in autumn, intensification in winter, physical fulfillment in spring, and dissolution in summer.

The first moment is the discovery of the hands after the midday prayer:

“L’indicible du geste” – the unspeakable nature of gesture – is the principle of desire in the novel: it remains in the body, in touch, in scent, in silence. In a space where the language of love is forbidden, the body takes over communication completely.

The Islamic context is crucial here: The embrace of two men – the “moanéghé” – the handshake after prayer, the wrestling on the lawn are religiously sanctioned forms of male physical contact. Desire hides within these permitted gestures and subverts them from within.

The regime, which controls all forms of desire, has sanctified the physical embrace between men. Desire exploits this loophole without ever naming it.

The wrestling scenes: body against body

In spring, the desire escalates into wrestling scenes on the school lawn:

Scent, texture, color, sweat, the blue of the shirt, the green of the grass – these are impressionistic brushstrokes that describe an act of love without ever naming it as such. The protagonist explicitly comments on this refusal to classify:

In a regime that seeks to name, classify, and control everything, nameless desire is the last, unconquerable space of the self.

The resolution in the summer

In summer, desire cools – on the part of the “martyr’s” brother. He becomes distant, guilty, absent:

The protagonist experiences desire as "sovereignty of desire"; the martyr's brother experiences it as guilt. The regime has also reached him—not through external coercion, but through the internalization of its norms. Desire does not fail because of itself, but because of the irreconcilable worlds from which the two come.

Hockney: Desire as Freedom

The discovery of Hockney adds a final dimension to desire. The brother's friend calls Hockney "homosexual"—the first time this word is used in the novel.

Hockney's homosexuality is not presented as a problem, but rather as a characteristic of extraordinary freedom. The protagonist, who never names his own desire, sees in Hockney a possible future: a world in which desire can have a name and still be free.

Desire is ever-present in the novel, yet consistently nameless – and this namelessness is not repression, but an aesthetic and political choice. Kadivar describes it using the tools of Impressionism: as smell, color, body heat, light on skin – as a sensory experience that defies all classification.

Cézanne as the silent center of the novel

In DAP, the word "image" structures a profound opposition that permeates the entire text: on the one hand, the forced, life-killing propaganda photograph of the fallen schoolmate; on the other, the liberating, life-creating painting. The photograph in the school corridor is, as it is described, an "opaque non-image"—the death of the image, its own death as an image. ¹⁹It crushes the memory of the living. ²⁰, destroys the lived connection ²¹In contrast, painting stands in contrast: producing an image is an act of power. ²²Humanity is a long history of images ²³And to create an image means to reconnect with life in a different way. ²⁴The narrator experiences himself simultaneously as a battlefield: there is a war of images between the universe of art and the images and non-images of propaganda and war. His eyes are the arena of battle. ²⁵

This tension gradually resolves itself over the course of the year: In the end, shortly before departure, the transformation is complete – the image in the corridor is no longer an abyss, one can see spots and lines, nuances of color and light. ²⁶ —and finally: Now invisible, it will inhabit him far from the land and the continent. ²⁷The image does not disappear; it migrates inwards and becomes part of one's own perceptual history.

Ekphrasis as a structural principle

The Cézanne painting doesn't appear only once in the novel, but recurs like a leitmotif. Each time the painting is described, it reflects the protagonist's inner state and simultaneously comments on the power of a painting. The introduction is significant in its framing: "Ma mère a dit un jour : 'Il manque un tableau dans le salon sur le mur de gauche.' Et elle m'a laissé choisir" (p. 34). The protagonist was allowed to choose—in a household where the father wields authority, in a country where the regime makes all the elections, this small act of self-determination is not trivial.

The first ekphrasis: The living image against the image of death

The eye circulates, finds a conversation partner, is guided, dances. This is contrasted with the "horreur de l'obstruction" of the martyr's photograph. Kadivar's deepest art-theoretical statement: An image that liberates seeing is ethically good; an image that kills seeing is ethically evil.

The image theory: Imago versus photo of death

The martyr photograph aspires to be an imago, but it fails. Cézanne's still life, on the other hand, is an imago in the truest sense: it resurrects Cézanne's perception in the presence of the viewer. The paradox of the still life: "Dead nature" is more alive than the photograph of the dead man.

Cézanne's phrase: “La nature est à l'intérieur”

“Je me sens un peu Cézanne chaque fois” – this sentence is a key autopoetological statement that extends beyond the passage itself: The protagonist identifies not with a hero, not with a martyr, not with a political activist, but with a painter who set off for the mountain every morning with easel and canvas. Writing the novel is Kadivar’s path to Sainte-Victoire.

Multiperspectivity as a political form

The emphasis on Cézanne mocking the monolithic perspective and offering multiple viewpoints is not only art-historically precise but also politically fundamental. The regime of the Islamic Republic is a perspectival dictatorship. Cézanne's multiperspectivity is structurally anarchic: there is no center from which everything is correctly seen; seeing itself is plural, fluid, and never-ending. By literally placing this Cézanne in the living room of his parents' house—the best room, for guests—Kadivar makes multiperspectivity a principle of domesticity. The regime can occupy the school corridor, but it cannot occupy the living room, where a painting hangs that welcomes every gaze and favors none.

Image gallery: Cézanne, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Mondrian, Hockney

The novel unfolds a veritable gallery of painters who together form an aesthetic Bildungsroman that runs parallel to political oppression. Cézanne is the structural center. Van Gogh is the correspondent, the dead man to whom the protagonist writes – “Dear Vincent” – because one can trust a dead man, because he doesn't monitor, doesn't denounce: Van Gogh represents the exiled community of art as the only safe space for communication, and his practice of writing and drawing in the same act is the model for Kadivar's own fusion of writing and seeing. Rembrandt becomes significant primarily through the ekphrasis of Abraham and Isaac: The protagonist reads the painting against its religious instrumentalization, seeing not the test of faith, but the light – “intense et tamisée à la fois” – that illuminates the hands, the tender gesture of the angel who prevents the murder at the last moment; Rembrandt teaches that the same image can be ideologically constrained or aesthetically liberated, depending on how one sees it. Mondrian is the radical continuation of the Impressionist project: “son regard s’aiguise pour percer le réel” – and his geometric stillness is not an escape from the world, but its deepest penetration, a response to the “brouhaha assourdissant du présent” through silence and structure. Hockney, finally – discovered in the summer by the brother's friend, who pulls him from his suitcase like a gift from California – is the culmination: “A Bigger Splash” teaches the protagonist that painting can capture the absolute moment, “le présent de la sensation,” and that a homosexual painter with bleached hair and round glasses embodies a freedom unthinkable in Islamic Iran in 1982, and all the more powerful for that very reason. Together, these five painters form an invisible polyptych that covers the walls of the Shiraz high school layer by layer and represents the novel's true educational program: learning to see as a form of freedom.

After its initial, detailed ekphrasis, the Cézanne painting is no longer explicitly described—it remains present as a silent backdrop. The deepest function of the Cézanne ekphrasis in the novel is that of a guarantee of survival: whoever learns to see like Cézanne—pluralistic, attentive, turned towards the light, distrustful of totality—can survive in a totalitarian world without losing their soul.

Religion and Politics

Religion

Religion in the novel is neither categorically rejected nor nostalgically idealized. The regime has instrumentalized Islam, thereby creating a division: between religion as a living, sensory experience and religion as a state apparatus, as a justification for executions. The most honest passage about this ambivalence is the one about God, who walks inside the protagonist at night.

It is a personal, almost negotiable relationship with transcendence: God as a nightly guest, not as a daily dictator. The Nohés—the lamentations, originally stemming from Shiite mourning rituals and now repurposed for state propaganda—form the acoustic center of the critique of religion: the mystical poets, with Hafez and Rumi in the background, are incorporated as quotations into propaganda speeches. For the protagonist, this is the true blasphemy: not atheism itself, but the appropriation of poetry by politics. Not learning to pray is a vow to himself—the religious form of a promise is used to reject religion. The most tender religious gesture in the novel is that of the father: every morning he performs a ritual before the jasmine bush, which the protagonist explicitly calls "une prière. La seule" (p. 110). When the institutional god becomes a weapon, the sacred migrates to the garden, to the smell, to the silence of the early morning.

Besides the father's jasmine ritual, a series of other rituals permeate the novel, all sharing the same basic structure: repetition as a refuge, the body as a vessel of meaning the regime cannot decipher. The daily midday prayer in the schoolyard is a state-mandated ritual that the protagonist and the martyr's brother hollow out from within—their four hands, touching in the prescribed gesture and thereby engaging in a completely different, unspeakable communication, transform the collective ritual of submission into an intimate ritual of desire: "Personne n'entend nos mains." The letters to Van Gogh—always beginning "Cher Vincent," always interspersed with drawings—are a writing ritual that counters the silence of surveillance with a regularity that is, by definition, uncontrollable because its addressee is dead. The evening painting lessons in the basement—the setting up of the still life, the contemplation of the object, the concentrated silence—are repeated with the reliability of a daily prayer and form the counter-rhythm to the obligatory Quran recitation in the morning. And finally, the wrestling matches on the school lawn in spring: they, too, follow a structure of repetition, a well-rehearsed sequence of approach, grasping, falling, which takes on the form of a ritual—with sweat, rosewater, the scent of grass as constant sensory markers. What unites all these rituals is their nature as clandestine liturgies: they make use of the forms that the regime knows and tolerates—prayer, school, sports—and create within them an invisible interior space that no surveillance enters.

Politics and power

Politics in the novel is never confronted head-on – there are no manifestos, no heroic speeches. The regime is so omnipresent that it needs no description; it is the air one breathes. Kadivar portrays power not as a dramatic event, but as an atmosphere, as a constant pressure on the body and consciousness.

The first political description is a phenomenology of acceleration: “In recent years, everything has happened very quickly: suddenly the revolution, suddenly the executions, suddenly the war, suddenly the oppression. The world around me has accelerated abruptly, has become incomprehensibly more brutal and has shrunk.” ²⁸ The fourfold repetition of "soudain" is both rhythmic and political. The school is the microcosm of power: "Every morning, we students all gather in the schoolyard or in the large hall, and before class, we have to be force-fed the Quran, followed by political propaganda." ²⁹ The verb “ingurgiter” – to funnel in – is precise: not education, but forced feeding of consciousness.

The televised confessions of the Toudeh members are a politically powerful scene: The protagonist describes Kianouri's body with the same ekphrastic precision as Cézanne's fruits: "The body is slumped in on itself, the sunken shoulders drawn towards the chest. The head is bowed. The voice is broken, it comes out with difficulty, it seems to resist its own words." ³⁰ The voice resists what it must say – it wants to remain silent like Cordélia. That is the complete political analysis in a single sentence: The regime forces people to speak against themselves.

The maternal scene on television—a mother who welcomes her son's execution as God's will—is the novel's abyss: "She did not commit infanticide but celebrated the near execution of her son, according to God's verdict" (p. 68). Kadivar places this scene directly next to Rembrandt's ekphrasis of Abraham and Isaac, thus demonstrating that the regime has brought the Abrahamic trial story to its conclusion without a saving angel.

The political spatial analysis is precise: the regime has completely occupied public space – the street with Nohés, the school with photos of martyrs, television with confessions and executions, the once beautiful Paramount cinema with Koranic verses and Khomeini slogans. What remains are the in-between spaces: the walk to school, the basement of the art studio, the room with Dostoevsky on the wall, the garden with the jasmine. Power is never absolute, because it cannot control the twenty minutes of walking, because it cannot forbid the scent of jasmine, because it cannot prevent a teenager from writing to a dead Dutch painter at night.

Aesthetics as politics: Anti-ideology through form

The political dimension of Kadivar's novel lies not only in its content, but also in its form. The way the novel is written is itself a political act: a systematic anti-ideology that contradicts totalitarianism on every level of language, structure, and perception.

Against clarity

Ideology asserts a single truth, a single perspective. The Iranian regime of 1982 is a perspectival dictatorship. Kadivar's novel is structurally the opposite: it operates with multiple time levels, with a narrator who is simultaneously fifteen and fifty, with a logic of memory that does not progress linearly but circles. What Cézanne does with perspective, Kadivar does with narrative: he rejects a single viewpoint and instead sets up a plurality of perspectives. A novel that lacks a unified perspective cannot be used as a propaganda tool.

Against abstraction

Ideology is abstracted: it transforms the concrete human being into a symbol, individual death into a collective sacrifice. Kadivar's novel is radically concrete: he describes smells, nuances of color, body temperatures, the weight of a hand, the texture of a shirt, the light at a particular time of day. The impressionistic technique is thus structurally anti-ideological: it prioritizes perception over meaning, the moment over doctrine, the individual over the collective.

Against Teleology

Ideology is teleological: it has a goal, a final state—the Islamic state, victory in war, the paradise of the martyrs. The novel's narrative structure is the opposite: circular, spiral, without a triumphant conclusion. The novel begins and ends with the same image—but now invisible, internalized, taken into exile. It rejects all kinds of narratives of salvation—religious as well as political.

Against the language of the regime

The regime controls Persian: it has closed universities in the name of the "Cultural Revolution," banned books, and co-opted mystical poetry as quotations in propaganda speeches. By writing in French, Kadivar removes his text from the direct reach of this linguistic policy. French is the language of distance, of a different cultural tradition—and thus the space in which lived experience can be transformed into literature. The novel is not political despite its literary nature, but because of it.

Against the appropriation of death

The martyr's photograph is meant to convey that death is meaningful and calls for discipleship. Kadivar contrasts this with the Roman imago: the personal, familial image of the deceased, kept in a household niche, not displayed in a public corridor. The martyr's photograph represents the failure of the imago: it is so distorted that it establishes no personal connection: "It is the death of the image, the death of itself as an image." ³¹ Kadivar's novel is the true imago of the dead schoolmate – the image that brings him back as an individual, as the young man who stood on his bicycle in front of the door and said: "On ne sait jamais."

Against the noise

The regime is loud: Nohé's music blares from every loudspeaker, Koran recitations are propaganda speeches, and televised confessions fill the air. Kadivar's novel is quiet. The most important moments are moments of silence: the twenty-minute walk to school, the art class in the basement with its "tendent silence of concentration," the hands after prayer, the father before the jasmine. "Mondrian introduces me to the silence in which one tries to hear something beyond the deafening noise of the present." ³² Kadivar's quiet prose is itself this method of knowledge in action.

Against simplification

Ideology divides the world into believers and unbelievers, martyrs and enemies. Kadivar reveals the complexity of his characters: the martyr's brother is simultaneously an object of desire and a potential informant, religiously sincere and vividly sensual. The father is both authoritarian and tender, a supporter of the revolution and its victim. This refusal to reduce characters to their political function is the novel's most profound anti-ideological gesture.

compared with The night is endless. and Petit livre des migrations

Conceptual framework and sensual embodiment

The Petit livre des migrations (2015) and Dernière année au pays natal (2026) connects a relationship akin to cause and retrospection: the earlier book is the essayistic skeleton that becomes lived experience in the later one. In PLM, the first-person plural narrative voice of the essayist recounts what she has gone through—the escape from Iran in 1983, the arrival in Roissy on October 30, learning French, the violent severing of her mother tongue, Persian. These biographical coordinates reappear in DAP, but now narrated from within, as lived hours: the last summer in Chiraz, the evening class with the painter, the picture of the fallen comrade in the school hallway, the Passover cantata, and the departure. What appears as a summarizing sentence in PLM is, in DAP, the entire subject matter of the novel.

At the same time, PLM already contains the conceptual core that structures DAP: the idea of ​​migration as an inner form of survival, the conviction that it expresses a "desir de survie intérieure" (desire for inner survival). In DAP, it is painting that fulfills precisely this function: an inner migration against the ossification of the regime. PLM calls this idea abstract; DAP shows it in concrete action, image by image. The two books form a double work: one the reflexive framework, the other its sensual, narrative embodiment.

DAP and UDN: A Diptych

Pedro Kadivar's German novel The night is endless. (Sujet Verlag, 2023) is a companion work to DAP – not in the sense of a sequel, but in the sense of a complementary exploration of related themes in another language. The German-French podcast Literature Sigrid Brinkmann presented Kadivar's German debut novel in a reading in Berlin in April 2026. Exploratorium dedicated.

UDN portrays two refugees in Berlin: one from East Germany, one from Iran. They have been a couple for almost twenty years and are searching "for themselves, for each other, for a common language." The novel is set in contemporary Berlin—the place that in DAP only appears as the perspective of the remembering narrator, but is not narrated. It is as if UDN picks up precisely where DAP implicitly ends: in exile, in Berlin, in the present.

The most striking difference lies in the language policy: DAP is written in French, UDN in German. Kadivar is an author of two languages—this is not a matter of accidental bilingualism, but rather a double exile situation: he came to France at sixteen, acquired French as his first language of exile, and then German as his second. The French of DAP is the language with which Kadivar enters a different literary realm. The German of UDN is the language of Berlin, of the present, of everyday relationships.

In UDN, the motif that remains implicit in DAP appears explicitly: translation as both profession and metaphor. The narrator works as an interpreter and describes the existential imposition of translation—"a whole person intrudes"—as a loss of boundaries and exhaustion. This topos connects both novels: in DAP, the protagonist is a being between worlds, something to be translated; in UDN, the narrator is a translator in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

The mottos with which UDN opens – Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet), Martin Buber (Ich and Du), Friedrich Hölderlin (Hyperion) –, map the thematic field of both novels: identity as plurality, relationship as the site of subject constitution, exile as a condition of writing. When Hölderlin asks, “What is the purpose of infinity in his breast?”, this question is also posed to the protagonist in Schiras 1982: a young man who feels more than the world around him allows.

The two books, read together, form a diptych: DAP depicts the wound of origin, UDN the present reality of living with this wound. The Berlin self, only marginally visible in DAP, becomes the protagonist in UDN.

Concluding remark

DAP begins with a young man in front of a picture of a dead man: “A young man looks at the disfigured face of his friend who died as a martyr, whose photo is on display in their school in Shiraz, Iran, in the autumn of 1982.” ³³ This opening possesses cinematic precision: a single sentence that encapsulates character, relationship, death, medium, place, and time. The young man's gaze upon the image is the novel's first and fundamental act: seeing. The novel's conclusion returns to the same image—but now invisible, internalized, taken into exile. There is no resolution, no overcoming, no healing: the image wanders. What ultimately prevails is not a departure, but transformation: the transmutation of experience into form, of a past into a book.

This is the meaning of the title: it is the last year in the country of birth—not only because the protagonist leaves afterward, but because the act of writing has irrevocably transformed this time into literature. The beginning (the viewing of the picture) and the end (the end of the school year, the farewell) frame an educational process that is not ordinary education: not integration, not harmonization, but the cultivation of an open-ended, critical, aesthetic awareness of a world that is dissolving.

DAP is a novel at the crossroads of several literary traditions, which it productively subverts: a coming-of-age novel without educational success in the conventional sense; autofiction without narcissistic self-reflection; a political testimony without a pamphlet; lyricism in prose without sentimentality. Its central paradox is that of aesthetic resilience: precisely because the world is disintegrating—"un monde qui se délite"—a sensibility unfolds that the regime cannot grasp. This sensibility is not escapism, but rather the very survival of the soul.

With this book, Kadivar places himself within a tradition of exile literature that understands writing in a language other than one's homeland as a constitutive act: French is not the language of Iran, and precisely for that reason, it is the language in which Iranian trauma takes form. The distance of exile enables form; form enables grief; grief enables memory; memory, in the act of writing, becomes literature.

The novel's universal question – "How to save one's soul in a world that succumbs to elitism?" – takes on a new relevance in 2026. Kadivar's novel appears at a moment when Iran is once again at the center of a military conflict. What the book depicts for the year 1982 – daily life under a regime that consumes young people as martyrs, the image of the disfigured dead schoolmate in the corridor, the Nohé propaganda machine, the body as material of the state – is not a closed story, but a structure that repeats itself. Those who read the book today read it with the knowledge that the sons and daughters of that generation are now once again embroiled in a war whose imagery shares the same grammar as that of 1982. The seemingly private, lyrically understated book unexpectedly becomes a political document, drawing the question from the past into the present without Kadivar needing a single contemporary word to do so.