Atiq Rahimi, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, 2002

Rahimi’s first novel Earth and Ashes was impressive enough to actually alter the course of my reading and look much more at fiction from the point of view of those affected by war. Now with A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear Rahimi revisits the same period – the 1970s Russian invasion of Afghanistan – but the result is far less direct or, for that matter, clear. Farhad, a Kabul student, has been badly beaten by occupying Soviet soldiers, and he is taken in by an unknown Afghan woman and her son, who strangely refers to him as ‘father’. But her act of kindness subjects both of them, and their families, to rules of honour as rigid and unbreakable as the curfew imposed by the communist invaders. For his second outing Rahimi has chosen to write in a prose that is often as deliberately obfuscating as it is endlessly digressive – the narrative jumps back and forth in time, mostly while the narrator spends a great deal of effort trying to understand (or failing that, imagine) the circumstances of those around him, as if his own situation wasn’t bad enough and his appetite for personal disaster has been left unsated. His own survival seems less important than it ought to be for a man in his position, and this is the most unconvincing aspect of the story. The half-awake disorientation that fills the first fifty pages could have been condensed into twenty, there is a most excellently written chapter at a pivotal moment halfway through, but the closing pages feel like the threads of a once-strong rope unravelling. The after-effect is that of a clearly imagined story blurred by too many layers of meaning added after possibly too many rewrites; Rahimi clearly knows what he means to say, but this over-reliance on overcooked prose means his story falls too far short of what may once have been a worthwhile and much better communicated idea.  PY

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Atiq Rahimi, Earth and Ashes, 2000

Set during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Earth and Ashes is a first novel from an Afghan film-maker more accustomed to making documentaries. This is worth mentioning as the book reads as a short personal fable and packs its emotional punch by looking at the spiritual cost of a person subjected to loss as opposed to any visually distressing imagery, which this book veils behind the digressive ramblings and nightmares of an elderly man in the shock of sudden grief. Earth and Ashes opens with Dastaguir, an Afghan grandfather and the book’s narrator, taking his grandson Yassin to see the boy’s father Murad, who works in a Russian mine, with the purpose of explaining to him that the rest of the family has been killed after the Russian army, in a fit of obstinate pique, obliterated their entire village.

This book’s tellling in the second person (a rare thing in itself) as opposed to the first or third is a clever device which removes the reader from experiencing directly the shellshock of what Dastaguir himself has experienced: he is clearly in a confused and distressed state yet still feels he must do the right thing and withdraws into frequent internal debates about his proper course of action, one of his reference points being the eleventh century Persian epic The Book of Kings which is interwoven with various well-depicted dreamlike visions. Earth and Ashes is as far removed from the political causes for the execution of a war as any book could probably be, and focuses entirely on how this simple man is now forced to deal with an impossibly complex and traumatic event; Dastaguir, as a result, is given a troubled dignity that seems far beyond the reach of the rest of us. At times it seems like almost every sentence in this book is calculated to extract the reader’s sympathy, but the overall effect is rather positively overwhelming. Highly recommended.   PY

•  Earth and Ashes was shortlisted for the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

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