The condition of the immigrant in a distant country, the disorientation in the face of the host country's behavior, the challenging search for identity, and the precarious balance between memory and the present are themes found in the novels of Iranian author Kader Abdolah. In The Journey of the Empty Bottles, it is Bolfazl, the protagonist and Abdolah's alter ego, who provides testimony to an immigration story and a slow process of adaptation to a reality so different from his previous life. In the subsequent novel, Cuneiform Writing, Ismail, another reflective figure of Abdolah, traces the river of his past, reflecting nostalgically and poetically on eighty years of Iranian history. For Kader Abdolah, a political refugee in the Netherlands since 1988 and recipient of the Het Gouden Ezelsoor 1993 for the best-selling debut work, literature gains moral value and an essential role as a witness, practiced also through the unusual adoption of the language of his adopted country.
