FICTION: AFGHAN THRILLER
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by Atiq Rahimi
Farhad, the 21-year-old hero of Atiq Rahimi’s taut, layered novel, “A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear,” is leading a regular life until the night he is beaten senseless by soldiers while returning home drunk past curfew in Kabul. They abandon him beside a sewage ditch. As he fades in and out of consciousness, he is rescued by a young widow, Mahnaz, whom he first believes is his sister. Farhad is watched by her son, who insists on calling him “Father.” Mahnaz also cares for her younger brother, who after being imprisoned for three months can now only shake and moan — a warning of what might lie ahead for Farhad if the soldiers catch him again.
They are, in fact, searching for him. As his hallucinations ease, his situation grows more desperate and more absurd. Caught in a Kafkaesque web, he becomes a target for two competing factions struggling for control of his country: the communists and the Islamists. The soldiers claim he distributed leaflets. The Islamists brand him an infidel. He is violating cultural tradition by remaining in the young widow’s home, putting them both at risk. When his mother comes to visit, hidden beneath a laundry-woman’s veil, she tells him he must escape in a rolled-up carpet that was her dowry. “I do believe in the journey of my soul, in the existence of the djinn, in the finality of death — but I cannot believe what I’m going through right now,” Farhad reflects. In one night, he’s been yanked from the boundaries of his life.
Kabul-born Rahimi, a filmmaker, as well as a novelist, fled Afghanistan in the mid-1980s, crossing the mountains by foot into Pakistan before moving to France. This novel is set during the tumultuous days before the Soviet invasion of 1979, but in many ways it could have come from nearly any slice of Afghanistan’s recent history, with its abrupt invasions, reversals and betrayals. In this way, “A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear” is the intimate narrative not only of Farhad, but of an entire desperate, anguished country.
