Earth and Ashes, a small novella, packs more feeling and more power into its few pages than most other books do in hundreds of pages, and few, if any, readers will emerge from it unscathed. Author Atiq Rahimi, an Afghan national now living in France, has recreated the Afghanistan he remembers when it was occupied by the Russians (1979 – 1989). He was seventeen at the time, and life has not improved much for the populace since then. Only the enemies have changed, and they now include many factions from within. Without preamble or any lengthy setting of the scene, the author introduces a main character who is faced with a family crisis from which he may never recover, then tells that story in plain, direct, and straightforward language which gains impact from its very simplicity. Dastaguir, a grandfather accompanied by his small grandson, is walking along a dusty road from his town of Abqul toward the coal mines of Karkar to find his son.
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A successful novelist now living in Fremont, California, Amir receives a phone call from his father’s former business partner, Rahim Khan, now in Pakistan. Rahim had stayed behind in Afghanistan when Amir and his father escaped to America in 1981, and he is now dying. An intimate part of the family, Rahim has long been aware of a childhood betrayal committed by Amir, one which had catastrophic consequences for others and which has tormented Amir for his entire life. “There is a way to be good again,” Rahim Shah tells him, and Amir immediately sets off for Pakistan to see him for the last time. In flashbacks, Hosseini recreates the day-to-day existence of Amir and his father, a highly successful merchant in Kabul in the 1970′s, creating a warm and emotionally involving story of childhood and its traumas and stressing the importance of family in times of trouble, as he follows the lives of Amir and his father until Amir is in his late thirties. Despite some narrative clumsiness, however, the novel is a moving, dramatic, personal, and compelling read, fascinating in its setting and in its development of the father-son relationship. I was totally engaged by its characters–and by its considerable charm. (Just click on the title to see full review.)
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