Atiq Rahimi: Earth and Ashes
It takes a hell of a writer to describe a moving story in less than 100 pages. Atiq Rahimi is up for it. With a simple but beautiful prose, this French-Agfhan writer tells the story of Dastguir, a very old man whose whole family was killed under the Russian bombs. The only survivors are his son Murad who works in a mine after having left his family in the custody of his father, and his grandson Yasin. But Yasin did not come out of it intact. Yasin lost his hearing. But to Yasin, it is not he who lost his hearing, but the world who has lost its voice. Should Dastguir go tell his son that his son is the only thing left for him in the world? Or should he spare him the heartache and the pain? Told in second-person, the reader is summoned to put his heart into this book and have a moment of beauty, hope and survival.
It takes a hell of a writer to describe a moving story in less than 100 pages. Atiq Rahimi is up for it. With a simple but beautiful prose, this French-Agfhan writer tells the story of Dastguir, a very old man whose whole family was killed under the Russian bombs. The only survivors are his son Murad who works in a mine after having left his family in the custody of his father, and his grandson Yasin. But Yasin did not come out of it intact. Yasin lost his hearing. But to Yasin, it is not he who lost his hearing, but the world who has lost its voice. Should Dastguir go tell his son that his son is the only thing left for him in the world? Or should he spare him the heartache and the pain? Told in second-person, the reader is summoned to put his heart into this book and have a moment of beauty, hope and survival.
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