Description

Reviews and press:

read into_life:

It is a book about the travails of borders - national, cultural, linguistic and interpersonal - in a demonstrably infinite world. There is a whole universe in these 200 pages that leaves me shaken and infinitely grateful […]. (…) more

a.reading being:

It is a quiet book that slows you down enormously when you read it. I kept reading individual sentences several times because Kadivar managed to find words for something that I had been looking for all my life. What remains is a lot of marked sentences and thoughtfulness. (…) more

Jungle.world:

Pedro Kadivar gave up his native language after fleeing Iran. A conversation about internal and external migration, the abolition of borders in literature and a memorable night with Heiner Müller. (...) more

FixPoetry:

At the age of sixteen, Pedro Kadivar escaped the horrors of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution, settled in France, did his Abitur there, studied literature and theater studies, and to this day he directs and writes in French. After his migration, he completely broke with his homeland, with his language, because, like er says in an interview with Jungle World that geography was in me through language. He wants to give up his mother tongue completely, but at the same time he has to realize that this is not possible because, along with other languages, Persian is a basic noise inside me. (...)more

Pedro Kadivar's essay on migration in culture and language, which is well worth reading:

You don't choose your mother tongue,” Pedro Kadivar notes at the beginning. Everyone is given it without being asked, but not everyone can escape it as elegantly as Kadivar, who was born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1967. At sixteen, full of youthful vigour, which he didn't think he could live out in Iran, he went to France. The illusion-saturated lightness of the last few weeks at home is given much more weight in this "Little Book of Migrations" than the struggle to turn the three-month tourist visa into a permanently legalized residence and a school and university degree, or the question of how he did all this actually funded. (...) more

Sebastian Galyga, queer.de:

In his recently published debut novel “Infinite is the Night”, the writer and theater maker Pedro Kadivar approaches the subject of migration, this time using the means of literature… “Infinite is the Night” starts at the level of language as a medium of communication to analyze the experience of migration, … The novel begins with the grand narrative, even flirting with its own fabrication several times when the narrating characters explain that they actually don’t want to write a novel or prose, although human beings are the result of overcoming them setting already in hand. This search movement, the longing to find a way of expressing one's own experiences, is in itself a highly literary one. (...) more