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The Swallows of Kabul: Summary and book reviews of The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra, plus links to an excerpt from The Swallows of Kabul and a biography of Yasmina Khadra.
The Swallows of Kabul
by
Yasmina Khadra
Hardcover: Feb 2004,
208 pages.
Paperback: Apr 2005,
208 pages.
Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this extraordinary novel takes readers into the lives of two couples: Mohsen, who comes from a family of wealthy shopkeepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, who was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face. Intersecting their world is Atiq, a prison keeper, a man who has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq and is now dying of sickness and despair.
Desperate, exhausted Mohsen wanders through Kabul when he is surrounded by a crowd about to stone an adulterous woman. Numbed by the hysterical atmosphere and drawn into their rage, he too throws stones at the face of the condemned woman buried up to her waist. With this gesture the lives of all four protagonists move toward their destinies.
The Swallows of Kabul is a dazzling novel written with compassion and exquisite detail by one of the most lucid writers about the mentality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world. Yasmina Khadra brings readers into the hot, dusty streets of Kabul and offers them an unflinching but compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair.
Book Reviews
Library Journal - Edward Keane
His jarring new work, ably translated from French, has crisp prose and an ominous--but not heavyhanded--tone as he contrasts the criminally absurd world of the Taliban's theocracy with touching and ultimately heartbreaking relationships of love and sacrifice that humanize the whole tragic society. Recommended for all fiction collections.
Kirkus Reviews
Khadra's unflinching portrayal of the scorching, suppurating environment in which these people struggle not to be noticed, is quite effective. And his principal characters' trials are ingeniously echoed in stark glimpses of other stunted, redirected figures. But Mohsen and Atiq declaim incessantly, creating static patches that stand out glaringly in this story's short compass--and are only partially redeemed by a powerful climax...Still, despite such contrivances, Khadra's latest is informed by a fine ironic intelligence, and its message is not an easy one to shake off.
Booklist - Ray Olson
Starred Review. In Kabul under the Taliban, two men walk the city in pain.
Publishers Weekly
Like Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, this is a superb meditation on the fate of the Afghan people.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
Yasmina Khadra — whose previous books have chronicled Algeria's savage civil war, pitting Islamic fundamentalists against the armybacked government — is intimately familiar with the consequences that war and religious extremism have on people's daily lives, and in this book he gives the reader a tactile sense of what life under the Taliban might have been like.
The New Yorker
Two men struggle to keep their sanity in a brief, despairing novel written pseudonymously by a former Algerian Army officer.... Khadra's prose is gentle and precise, but the violent climax of the book makes a powerful point about what can happen to a man when the light of his conscience has gone out.
J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature
Yasmina Khadra's Kabul is hell on earth, a place of hunger, tedium, and stifling fear.
Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
I am so grateful that the The Swallows of Kabul has been written, and written with such relentless poetry and passion. The reality of life under a rule such as the Taliban's makes us despair not only of the land that could tolerate such horror, but also of the world that for so long kept silent about it. However, the way that reality is narrated and ultimately redefined by Yasmina Khadra once more proves the power of fiction to turn our despair into hope, to restore our stolen sense of dignity and humanity and to desire life when death seems to be the safest refuge.
Da Chen, author of China's Son: Growing Up in the Cultural Revolution The Swallows of Kabul is reminiscent of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It is a gem in world literature--poetic, intimate, and poignant--painting a beautiful yet sorrowful landscape of a people and their turbulent lives, lived and lamented in a forgotten land. A must read.
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The Swallows of Kabul
Library Journal - Edward Keane
J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature
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