by Yasmina Khadra, John Cullen
A depressing little novel, a little strange.
What happens when you are surrounded by nothing but madness, desolation, and hate? Do you succumb to violence, depression, and despair? The Taliban rules in this novel set in Kabul, Afghanistan. Women are heavily restricted, forced to wear a burqa in public, never allowed to show their faces to t...
Hm. It was a little slow and going through it until right at the end, and then you're left with the 'what the ...?' feeling at the end. If the rest of the book was as quick a read as the end, it would have made for a better read. But then again, the detail added to being more shocked in the end.
Wow, great book. A chilling desolate prologue. Hints of tale of despair, yielding a spindled thin hope of overcoming. “Women mummified in shrouds the color of fever or fear, are utterly anonymous”.
In the general sense, [book: The Swallows of Kabul] is a short novel of Afghan life under the Taliban, but (as with Philip Caputos' Acts of Faith) the real message of this political novel is more personal and more penetrating. Here is book made to question the logic of fundamentalist rule. Here also...
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