In his debut novel “The End is Near”, playwright Amir Gudarzi tells of the difficulty of arriving after fleeing – deeply sad, touching, but never accusatory.
You have to be a bit crazy or rather brave if you, as a young author, try to sell Iranian state television a series whose bottom line is: Most of the editions of the Koran in circulation are brazen fakes in terms of content. A., as the main character of one of the chronologically earliest narrative strands in the novel “The End is Near” is called, is perhaps a bit crazy, perhaps quite courageous. And very probably not even an alter ego of the novelist Amir Gudarzi, who has the same initial and shares quite a lot of biographical information with A.. In any case, his youth in the Islamic Republic left the fictitious A. quite disillusioned when it came to faith: “He wrote commissioned works on religious topics, although he would have liked to fight religion, especially Islam.”