A character’s own life

An individual relationship

Kusheh asks about the relationships in Daniel and His Father. Rabihavi rejects the idea that a father’s experience makes every father-and-son relationship immediately understandable. Each relationship has its own pressures, and the novel brings different versions into contact rather than offering one reassuring pattern. Source 1

He also resists reading every character as the author in disguise. Experience can enter the work without making a character a declaration about his own identity. This distinction matters when the conversation turns to migration, sexuality and the lives writers are willing to imagine. Source 1

His examples range from Rostam and Sohrab in the Shahnameh to the fathers and sons within the novel. He asks whether protection, jealousy and fear can be disentangled, and whether a familiar account of fatherhood conceals another possibility. These are questions raised by his reading and by the fiction, rather than a settled explanation of every relationship. Source 1

A book finding its readers

The interview begins with a challenge to the language of becoming a global writer. Rabihavi questions why recognition in a small set of Western languages should determine whether a book belongs to the world. Translation enlarges a readership, but he treats it as a gradual encounter with individual translators and publishers. Source 1

Boys of Love provides a concrete example of delay, refusal and eventual publication. These are the author’s recollections of a book’s passage through publishing. The catalogue keeps composition, electronic publication, print editions and named translations as separate records. Source 1

Writing the present

Near the end, Rabihavi says he is finishing a novel called Report of a Dream, approaching street events through a military man’s daughter. That is a statement about work in progress in February 2023, rather than evidence of a published edition. His answer returns to the difference between the writer’s political feeling and the perspective through which a story is told. Source 1

The Tragedy of a Monarchy also enters the exchange. Rabihavi says he wanted to examine the strengths and failures of the earlier ruler instead of producing an uncomplicated celebration or condemnation. His discussion of that play concerns the writer’s responsibility to ask difficult questions, including questions that an audience may prefer to leave unasked. Source 1

Parenthood under pressure

Discussing Sia, Rabihavi connects the character’s reluctance to become a parent with the fear and violence of the 1980s. The disturbing question is whether bringing a child into an increasingly threatening world can itself become an act of harm. He offers this as a way into a fictional person’s anxiety, without making the character’s thoughts a declaration of his own intentions. Source 1

One aspect of Sia does resemble him, he says: the sense of being cut off from the place of birth. His wider answer describes migrants carrying inherited customs with them and sometimes remaining distant from the society in which they now live. This is his observation about migration, alongside his appreciation of the security and freedom to write he has found abroad. Source 1

He remembers wanting to record the war for people whose knowledge came through official accounts, and for generations who would follow. He had not wished for the war; the circumstances gave him a responsibility to write. That recollection explains an impulse behind the early fiction without reducing later characters to witnesses who speak only for their author. Source 1

Recognition and a curious reader

Kusheh raises Khaled Hosseini and Atiq Rahimi as examples of international recognition. Rabihavi’s response is critical of the preferences through which Western media and publishing encounter writers from elsewhere. He believes political expectations can shape that recognition. The judgement belongs to this interview; it is not an independently established explanation of either writer’s career. Source 1

He would rather have a small number of curious readers than a large audience attracted by a familiar formula. He also speaks with pleasure about young Iranian readers encountering books written before they were born. The answer gives readership a more intimate measure than visibility, sales or a translated prize selection. Source 1

The passage of Boys of Love through publishing also includes encouragement. Rabihavi names the critic Asad Seif, Gardoun and Abbas Maroufi in recalling the eventual Persian publication, followed by Christophe Balaÿ’s French translation. His account of refusals abroad includes reluctance that he did not attribute simply to religious censorship. Each decision belongs to a specific publishing encounter. Source 1

Sources & credits

1. Radio Zamaneh · Esfandiar Kusheh conversation

   Persian interview published 13 February 2023, around Daniel and His Father. Author replies and the introductory biography are distinct parts of the article.