Who kills whom?

Return to the first sentence

Ateshparvar argues that reaching the end of Hofre makes the reader return to its beginning with a changed understanding. The dead narrator’s voice initially appears to offer a realistic account, but that apparent realism already contains an impossible position from which to speak. Source 1

He follows the narrator’s shifts of address: to himself, to family members, to Zari and to an implied wider listener. Through those movements, the story constructs a past and identity while gradually making the hole both a physical detail and an organising feature of the narrative. Source 1

A double on either side of the weapon

The description of the killer returns as a description of Qasem himself. Ateshparvar reads this correspondence as the point where the person acted upon and the person acting cease to be securely separated. The structure asks the reader to revise the ordinary division between victim and perpetrator. Source 1

His appreciation rests on that formal discovery and the encounter of reality with the fantastic. It is one critical route into the story, distinct from Kamali’s emphasis on institutions and power. Hofre’s later Swedish appearance as Hålan remains a translation history rather than another critical essay. Source 1

Grammar that makes the double

Ateshparvar identifies another part of the construction in the movement between I, you and he, together with the corresponding changes in verbs. He argues that these grammatical movements make the narrator, the person addressed and the person described converge. For him, they are not detachable ornaments: separated from the story, the same pronouns would be ordinary words. Their arrangement belongs to the discovery that makes the ending alter the beginning. Source 1

Sources & credits

1. Hossein Ateshparvar · subject and object in Hofre

   Persian close reading, 16 March 2023. Hofre is the Persian story also published in Swedish as Hålan; translation and publication histories remain separate.