Goodreads asked Sima B. Moussavian:

What are you currently working on?

Sima B. Moussavian In college, I wrote my theses on conceptual semantics in Russian, and up to now I'm entirely impressed by the idea that the grammatical structure and concepts behind the word meanings of our native language highly influence the way we see the world. Every language has words which have no equivalent in other languages and are untranslatable. But not only that: even words with what they call an equivalent in other languages don't trigger the same associations and emotions in different linguistic communities, especially words we use for invisible things do not. Take soul, for example. We like to conceptualise it as a place/room/space. But how big is it for speakers of two different languages? In Russian, for example, "dusha" as the equivalent of "soul" contains and represents way more than what we mean by it. It is often said that "dusha" is - just like the Russian landscape - unbearably wide and spacious which is why it can never be filled. Speaking of "dusha", Russians would instantly associate it with a deep yearning, an endless nostalgia that never goes away. However, when we mention "soul" in English, we wouldn't from the start think of the lack that is implicit in the Russian term. What I'm at the start of, is a multi-lingual novel which is developing around differences like those, and that means it will have a few narrators, each of them from another country. The parts are going to be written in the native language of the narrator. All of them have been through the same situations, but they perceived them entirely differently. By this I want to demonstrate how much language shapes our perception and, with it, the reality we live in. It is a major project, though, and might take a few years.

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