A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Kabul, 1979. A student wakes in an unfamiliar house, battered and bruised. He gradually recovers his mind to discover that returning from a night out he was brutally attacked by soldiers and left to die.
Farhad, the tragic hero of this nightmarish tale, realises that he can now never return home: to do so would be to risk the lives of his family. As he waits for an answer to his plight he learns the tragic story of the woman who has saved him, endangering her own life in the process, and begins to feel an impossible and forbidden love for her - a love that embodies an angry compassion for the suffering of Afghanistan's women, and the yearning for a lost home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rahimi (The Patience Stone) overcomes a stuttering start to deliver an original and utterly personal account of the pressures a totalitarian society exerts on the individual in 1979 Afghanistan, before the Soviet invasion. After soldiers brutally beat Farhad, a sensitive 21-year-old student, he begins to grasp the less obvious but equally horrific abuse of Afghan women by the patriarchal, Islamo-fascist order. When Mahnaz, a grieving widow, rescues Farhad from the Kabul gutter where he lies bleeding and unconscious, he must come to grips with his own father's ignominious behavior and with the drastic plight of women like Mahnaz. In a particularly imaginative twist, Farhad becomes obsessed with the elaborate carpets that are such a part of daily life, realizing eventually that these beautiful household objects are merely metaphors for the ongoing tragedy that is the existence of the women who made them. A flawless translation does justice to Rahimi's taut, highly calibrated prose.
