The Persian Novel in French: A Hybrid Genre

Writers of Iranian origin who compose in French have published a fairnumber of novels in France since the beginning of the 1990s. This article analyzes the genre specificity of novels by Franco-Iranianauthors and the challenges that the inevitable influence of the Frenchnovelistic tradition present to the authors of this Iranian diaspora. I put the Persian novel in French into the context of the contemporary Persian literary system and then give a close reading of one novel to illustrate my point. I have chosen Sorour Kasmaï’s The Glass Cemetery (Le cimetière de verre, 2002) as representative of the trend. The analysis of this text, through its formal and content narrative features, shows that the use of French as a language of writing imposes certain literary norms and helps create a hybrid genre, which reflects the diasporic experience.