Atiq Rahimi
Pietra di pazienza

THE REVIEW

We see them in the reports about Afghanistan that appear on our television screens, wrapped in their pastel burqas, moving often in groups of two or three with grace, and we can only imagine their features because nothing of them is visible to us. But what are the thoughts, desires, worries of these women? What can we know of the despair, the frustration, the humiliations endured or the resignation, the submission that trouble their minds? Atiq Rahimi, in his first book in French, the literary sensation of the year, gives voice to a woman, a wife, and a mother, who could be one of those who appear fleetingly in the reports about Afghanistan on our news broadcasts.

An ordinary woman, in an ordinary place, who could be so many others. A voice first faint and whispered, then increasingly courageous, that screams and shouts despair and torments, suffering and humiliation, up to the long-hidden and never confessed secrets. At the bedside of a wounded and paralyzed warrior husband, counting the rosary and praying for his recovery, the woman transforms prayer into confession and release. She speaks to him as to a Sang-e Sabur, the patience stone that, according to Persian mythology, collects our confidences, absorbing all the secrets kept hidden from others until the day it explodes, liberating us. Thus the woman reveals to her husband lies, pretenses, cunning, small faults, and cleverness she has maintained since the day her parents chose him for her as a husband. Until the tragic, extreme, terrible conclusion.

"When it is difficult to be a woman, it also becomes difficult to be a man."

A novel set wherever there are fears and senseless violence, dedicated by the author to the Afghan poet Nadja Anjouman, murdered by her husband.