A Curse on Dostoevsky

“The moment Rassoul lifts the axe to bring it down on the old woman’s head, the thought of Crime and Punishment flashes into his mind.” And so begins and ends Rahimi’s (The Patience Stone) hallucinatory tale. Rassoul, an aimless young Afghan man in Kabul, who, inspired by Dostoyevski, murders Nana Alia, a wealthy old woman who prostitutes Sophie, the woman he loves (Sonia to his Raskolnikov). While Rassoul thinks Crime and Punishment “is best read in Afghanistan,” the country’s chaos turns this retelling of a classic into a darkly comic meditation on life in a lawless land. Like Raskolnikov, Rassoul suffers moral pangs and stumbles around Kabul mute and existentially broken, puffing on cigarettes and hashish as he finds them. When he turns himself in to absolve his guilt, he faces the Kafkaesque absurd: “In our dear legal system, killing a madam is not murder... So... so something else must be causing you this distress.” Rassoul’s quest for punishment is rebuffed, and we are free to ponder the purgatory of unpunished sin. In restrained prose, Rahimi explores both the personal and the political; it’s both in dialogue with a classic and is daringly outspoken. (Mar.)