Atiq Rahimi

An unnamed woman attends to her husband in a room of their house somewhere in Afghanistan. He has been shot in the neck by a fellow fighter and is unconscious. Shells from tanks fall around their house and gunfire erupts even during a purported ceasefire. At first the woman is tender in her ministrations and prays continually for his deliverance. But as the days pass with no change in her husband, she begins to find relief in confessing all her secrets to him, as though he were the fabled show more patience stone, which according to Persian folklore absorbs all the speaker's grievances until it explodes, taking all the speaker's worries with it.

Although the writing is very sparse (some have likened it to a play script), the emotions evoked by the woman's revelations are complex and layered. Like many Afghani woman, her life has been subjugated to the strictures of her father, her husband, society, and religious politics. Her attempts to exert control over her life, even by giving voice to her feelings and thoughts, have met with violence, so she has learned to remain silent. It is only now, with her husband unconscious and hostage to her ministrations, does she feel free to reveal her innermost secrets. show less

Earth and Ashes - ****
Only eighty pages long, a novella of extraordinary intensity: the journey of an old man and his grandson to see the old man's son (and the boy's father) after a Russian attack decimates their Afghan village and nearly everyone is killed. The first half of the book describes their wait at a checkpoint for a ride to take them on the last leg of their journey; the second half is about the old man's ride to and arrival at his destination. I tend not to read contemporary show more stuff for a number of reasons but this is remarkable for its timeliness and its timelessness.
Patience Stone: This work does nothing to change my opinion: he is a gifted observer and writer. The story is very simple: a woman cares for her comatose husband. It takes place in Afghanistan and, indeed, almost all of the book takes place in a single room. Although the war is always present, it’s never the focus—but its effect on people is ever-present and indelible. The story is the woman’s story, from her betrothal to the present moment, though told in retrospect. I think perhaps the best way I can urge you to read this is by quoting from a “review” by a woman on goodreads: “Very boring alternating with extremely depressing and painful, with the most HORRIFYING and DISGUSTING ending you could even possibly imagine. There's just no upside to reading this, just zero.” I hope you’re tempted now. An easy, if ultimately sad and yes, depressing, book. But very well worth your time.

The Patience Stone - ***+
I reviewed Earth and Ashes a couple years ago and was quite taken with Rahimi’s writing. This work does nothing to change my opinion: he is a gifted observer and writer. The story is very simple: a woman cares for her comatose husband. It takes place in Afghanistan and, indeed, almost all of the book takes place in a single room. Although the war is always present, it’s never the focus—but its effect on people is ever-present and indelible. The story is the woman’s story, from her betrothal to the present moment, though told in retrospect. I think perhaps the best way I can urge you to read this is by quoting from a “review” by a woman on goodreads: “Very boring alternating with extremely depressing and painful, with the most HORRIFYING and DISGUSTING ending you could even possibly imagine. There's just no upside to reading this, just zero.” I hope you’re tempted now. An easy, if ultimately sad and yes, depressing, book. But very well worth your time.

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear - ***+
The enormously disorienting opening of this novella brilliantly reflects the protagonist’s state of mind. It is Kabul, 1979; there has been a pro-Soviet coup followed by enormous civil unrest; the USSR will invade in December. (My volume contained both a very helpful introduction to what was happening in Afghanistan as well as a well-done glossary.) The streets are dangerous; curfews are strict; (constantly changing) laws and prejudices are enforced with guns. As the book opens, Farhad wakes—he thinks—but has no idea where he is, if he is alive or dreaming or simply dead, or anything else to help place him in time and space. He doesn’t recognize his surroundings and someone or something keeps saying “Father.” Much of the narration is stream of consciousness as Farhad struggles to understand and Rahimi’s prose and the construction of the story itself are impressive. Farhad’s struggles blend phantasmagorical dreams with nightmares and memories as well as intimations of what is happening around him. A page may contain a single sentence…or many paragraphs, reflecting his mind’s effort to organize his sensations and comprehend. Piece by piece the story emerges: he was out drinking past curfew, was stopped by patrolling soldiers and brutally beaten, left for dead. He was rescued by a widow living nearby and she and her young son tend to Farhad, an enormous risk for them all. Political and religious violations mount. Farhad’s political views are dangerous enough, but drinking, his abrupt disappearance after his beating, and his being cared for by a widow who, herself, is transgressing expected standards of behavior for women together with his fast-growing attachment to her all compound the enormous problem of his mere existence after the beating. Soldiers are actively looking for him. Farhad must decide what to do—about staying in Kabul, about his feelings, about the widow herself. Although I found both The Patience Stone and Earth and Ashes even more impressive, Rahimi is a greatly talented writer, a witness, and a writer with a powerful voice. show less

In the hyperbole and YA pomp-and-circumstance surrounding the release of Suzanne Collins' third volume in the Hunger Games trilogy, it would be easy to overlook the release of a slight volume of prose, translated from the French, of a story crafted from the mind of an Afghan expatriate and; while understandable, it would also be equally unforgivable. Atiq Rahimi's works are not so much as slight as they are distilled quintessences of stories, carefully crafted scenes of both physical and show more transcendent landscapes. Rahimi's stories strip out the superfluous in both language and meaning, providing the reader with true abstracts of the time-and-place and the characters. In Earth & Ashes, the story of an older man who must travel with his grandson to the mines where his son (the boy’s father) works, in order to deliver tragic news, the political language that one might expect to inform the whole of the story’s context, the Russians invading Afghanistan, is supplanted by the realty that Dastaguir (the older man) understands: the immediacy of having his village bombed, his having to witness the destruction and survive it and, to try to make sense of what is only tritely explainable. Dastaguir’s world is reduced to a landscape that has been rendered unto rubble, colored by the dust of the road and the soot of the mining camp, a world he must still literally and figuratively negotiate to reach his son, Murad. Along the way, through his dreams, his recollections, through the power of storytelling itself (the story of the guard, the story of the Book of Kings… ) Dastaguir tells us the story of himself, which is not the story of a doddering old man given to distraction as would seem, but the narrative of a man facing the daunting prospect of having to re-write his future history, his future identity, by aggregating his grief:

“You don’t hear the rest of the shopkeeper’s word. Your thoughts pull you inward, to where your own misery lies. Which has your sorrow become? Tears? No, otherwise you’d cry. A sword? No, you haven’t wounded anyone yet. A bomb? You’re still living. You can’t describe your sorrow; it hasn’t taken shape yet. It hasn’t had a chance to show itself. If only it wouldn’t take shape at all. If only it would fall silent, be forgotten… It will be so, of course it will… As soon as you see Murad, your son… Where are you Murad?”

Redacted from the original blog review at dog eared copy, Earth & Ashes and; The Patience Stone. 08/24/2010

1st read: 08/20-23/2010 show less

Dostoevsky fan living in wartime Kabul kills nasty old woman, becomes convinced that he's Raskolnikov and spends the book trying to work through his guilt and get arrested - but who'll arrest someone for doing something as inconsequential as murder, and of an unwed woman at that? Are you sure we shouldn't give him a medal instead, or at least declare him a martyr? How does the old Karamazov nonsense of "if God doesn't exist, everything is permitted" hold up in a society where everything is show more permitted and God is everywhere condoning it? Crosses Dostoevsky with Kafka's Vor dem Gesetz and Hedayat's fever visions - perhaps a bit too willfully intertextual at times, but quite effecive. show less