October 26, 2009
Rahimi (Earth and Ashes
) won the 2008 Prix Goncourt for this brief, melodramatic novel set amid factional violence “somewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere.” It follows the circumscribed movements of a Muslim woman largely confined to the house where she nurses her comatose husband, who's been shot by a fellow jihadist. A humorless, inflammatory mullah pays the woman unwelcome visits, and sexually menacing soldiers break into her house. Though such events generate tension and drama, the novel's cultural and historical milieu lacks specificity, and Rahimi may have erred in sketching the story's political context vaguely. For some readers, his intimate attention to objects and spaces may compensate for the grating confessional tenor that develops later, when the narrator divulges damning secrets to her husband's unresponsive body and fulfilling the book's premise a little too obviously by referring to him as her “patience stone.” McLean's translation is faultless, but the narrator's reminiscences feel stilted; the patience-stone conceit borders on gimmickry; and incidents of a violent or sexual nature seem overdetermined.
Starred review from November 15, 2009
The patience stone, according to Persian folklore, is a small black stone that absorbs what people confide in it. Filmmaker Rahimi ("Earth and Ashes") casts as the stone a person, one of the two nameless characters in this allegorical tale. Everything takes place in one room in the modest home of a fundamentalist Islamic war hero who lies comatose. His wife cleans him, moistens his open eyes, and feeds him a sugar/salt solution through a drip. She is distraught with her husband's state, the plight of her two young daughters, and the unnamed conflict going on outside her home. After talking politely to her husband and saying endless prayers, she gradually comes to pour out a fierce treatise on women's place in society, love, sex, marriage, and war. VERDICT Rahimi's lyric prose is simple and poetic, and McLean's translation is superb. With an introduction by Khaled Hosseini, this Prix Goncourt-winning book should have a profound impact on the literature of Afghanistan for its brave portrayal of, among other things, an Afghan woman as a sexual being.Lisa Rohrbaugh, National Coll., Youngstown, OH
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