cover image Earth and Ashes

Earth and Ashes

Atiq Rahimi. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $19 (96pp) ISBN 978-0-15-100698-4

The devastation of Afghanistan during the Soviet war is succinctly and piercingly conveyed in Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi (trans. from the Persian by Erdag M. Goknar), a novella-length account of an old man's futile journey. Dastaguir and his grandson Yassin wait beside a guard post on the road to the mine where Dastaguir's son Murad works. The family's village has been bombed, and everyone else in the family is dead; Yassin was deafened by the attack. While he waits for a ride to the mine, Dastaguir is visited by fantastic visions (""You find yourself standing on the branch of a jujube tree, stark naked""). The blasted dreamscape of Rahimi's story and his tightly controlled prose make this a sobering literary testament to the horrors of war.