A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear - Atiq Rahimi
My own voice chokes in my throat. I am still in a dream. Not a dream, a nightmare. A nightmare where you scream but can’t make a sound. A nightmare where you think you’re awake but you’re unable to open your eyes or move a muscle. Where you’re completely paralyzed.
Farhad is a typical student, interested in wine, women, and poetry, and negligent of his grandfather's religious conservatism. But one night changes all that. It is 1979, and Afghanistan is in the early days of the pro-Soviet coup. Farhad goes out drinking with a friend who is about to flee to Pakistan. A few hours later, he regains consciousness in a strange house, beaten and confused. At first, he thinks he is dead. Then he begins to remember what happened. His mind sifts through its memories, fears, hallucinations, and the outlines of reality start to harden. Farhad realizes that if he is to escape the soldiers who wish to finish the job they started, he must leave everything he loves behind him and finds a way to get to Pakistan.
Stretching to a length of just 170 odd pages, the book is compact, and there is no room for the backstories to root into in-depth character development. This book is told from Farhad's point of view, which comes to me as an intensely intimate portrait of a man who often questions his reality and also draws the limits of his possible survival in his imagination. The confusion over Farhad's state of mind, where he has a conversation with his inner voices about the messes of what happens to the soul when one dreams, stands as the significant accomplishment of this novel. Farhad's story is woven together with threads of imagination, memory, hallucination, punishment, desire, anger, confusion, and nightmares.
I think the best part of continuing the one-book-from-each-country project is the opportunity to read about various writers whose stories are often lost in an ocean of books and words.
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