Farhad is a typical student, interested in wine, women and poetry, and negligent of the religious conservatism of his grandfather. But one night changes all that. It is 1979 and Afghanistan is in the early days of the pro-Soviet coup. Farhad goes out drinking with a friend who is about to flee to Pakistan. A few hours later he regains consciousness in a strange house, beaten and confused. At first he thinks he is dead. Then he begins to remember what happened. As his mind sifts through its memories, fears and hallucinations, and the outlines of reality start to harden, he realises that, if he is to escape the soldiers who wish to finish the job they started, he too must leave everything he loves behind him and find a way to get to Pakistan.
I think the best part of continuing the book from each country challenge is the opportunity to read about various writers whose stories are often lost in an ocean of books and words.
I started this challenge by reading a book from Afghanistan "The Patience Stone" by Atiq Rahimi and I just loved that novella. It was short and presented the pain of an afghan women (or for that matter it could have been any afgham women). I loved the way Atiq used the metaphors and the words and that left me with the need to read more of Rahimi's works and it was just sheer luck that I found his second book and what followed ahead was just an emotional journey into the war torn land of Afghanistan.
Stretching to a length of just 170 odd pages, the book is compact and there is no room for the back stories to root into a deep character development. This book is told from Farhad鈥檚 point of view who comes to me as an intense intimate portrait of a man who often questions his reality and also draws the limits of his possible survival in his imagination. The confusion over Farhad鈥檚 state of mind, where he has a conversation with his inner voices about the confusions of what happens to the soul when one dreams, stands as the major accomplishments of this novel. Farhad鈥檚 story is woven together with threads of imagination, memory, hallucination, punishment, desire, anger confusion and nightmares.
Rahimi has once again written a sad account of the one of many shattered life of a person living in Afghanistan. The climax of the book remains delightfully ambiguous as to whether the events are real or imaginary. A thousand rooms of Dream and fear will remain one of the most honest book I've read for a long time and a book this beautiful deserves a second read.
Peque帽a historia de un peque帽o personaje, que percibe en su conciencia, como en un sue帽o, que algo especial le ha ocurrido.
A partir de ello, Fahrad se dedica a ir recorriendo las filigranas de una laber铆ntica alfombra, narrado de manera muy cinematogr谩fica.
Muy bueno.
Atiq Rahimi (Afganist谩n, 1962) es escritor y cineasta, radicado en Francia desde la invasi贸n sovi茅tica de su pa铆s (1978). En 2008 obtuvo el Premio Goncourt, m谩ximo premio otorgado a la literatura en franc茅s por su novela .
Reads more like a chiastic poem than a novel: the narrator, Farhad, begins and ends his account in a cloudy stupor of violence, confusion and terror. His only clarity of mind comes as he moves closer to Manhak, and the reader sees it wane once he leaves her presence.
The book is also a gender commentary: The men in the novel are selfish, violent, desperate, catatonic, and deceitful. The women of the novel quietly step in to assume the heavy burdens of the mens' decisions. The women hide their heartbreak and carry on.
The prose is absolutely beautiful. I would go so far as to call it stunning.
I was afraid this would be a very violent book, but the descriptions of violence were brief and limited to a beating by the butts of guns. No rape, or children suffering -- I can't handle that.
The one thing I did find hard to take was the language. The soldiers use the F word several times, in very offensive phrases, when beating Farhad. I winced every time I read the word.
I would recommend this book -- it's beautiful and haunting. I'm still thinking about it.
Very intense! Excellent chilling novella/short novel of only 147 pp. set in 1980's Afghanistan. A young student, Farhad, is drunk and out after curfew. Stopped by some soldiers on patrol, he's roughed up very badly then rescued by a young widow, Mahnaz, and taken to her house as he lies injured and bleeding on the ground. Much of the novel consists of his stream-of-consciousness thoughts, trying to reconstruct events in his mind, interspersed with distorted and twisted dreams, nightmares, and memories. He thinks of fleeing the harsh political situation to Pakistan. He begins to feel an infatuation for the woman for which he feels guilty--conservative Muslim men are never supposed to see or be in the company of a woman not their wife or family member. He is breaking a social taboo; the drinking was bad enough. The author's terse and incisive style put me right into Farhad's mind: with his dreams, fears, hallucinations... This is a must-read!! Fortunately, a glossary defined many Muslim, Persian or Afghani terms or place names used in the story. For instance, the "thousand rooms" is the Afghani expression for a labyrinth. The carpet in Farhad's family home is shown on the cover of the book; this carpet is incidental to the story.