To these flat stereotypes she offers complexity and depth, enriching the reader’s vocabulary of Iranian culture and Persian identity.

Daneshvar also writes of revolutionaries and what we may consider “religious zealots”, revealing the reality of people we have come to stereotype and perhaps misunderstand because of our own ignorance. The portrayal of Iranian women’s lives, options, how they behave under certain conditions, offers the reader an intimate experience of lives before unknown. There is an objectivity in her writing, a recording of events that play out when certain characters are in particular situations that allows the reader in. Her short stories, collected in Sutra and Other Stories and Daneshvar’s Playhouse, open a door to life in Iran, showing and revealing the truth of the life she lived and witnessed as well as many of her varied characters. Simin Daneshvar’s writing allows us into a world many of us in the west have never had an opportunity to access. ~Simin Daneshvar, Tehran, January 1988(DP 170) I have great hope that my dreams will come true, if not for my generation, then for the next.” I dream that they are finding a new and sure highway that leads to the freedom and the well-being of mankind. I dream that all the minds from all over the world have been drawn together, led by retired professors in both science and humanities, who can still think and work, and all of them, hand-in-hand, guiding us through wandering paths, blind alleys and winding roads. I dream that all money, wasted armaments, propaganda, hot and cold wars, is spent for the welfare of humanity. I dream that all nations have become one state. “When I am shivering from the cold, and darkness envelops me due to the scarcity of fuel and electricity brought on by Iraqi bombings of our towns and main centers of energy, I start dreaming about the future.

Savushun by simin daneshvar