Rassoul’s world consists of little more than a squalid rented room – strewn with books by Dostoevsky, relics from his days as a student of Russian Literature at Leningrad – and his beloved fiancée Sophia, for whom he would do anything.
So when he finds himself committing a murder, axe in hand, as if re-enacting the opening of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, his identification with the novel’s anti-hero is complete: Rassoul is Raskolnikov, transplanted to late twentieth-century Kabul. Amid the war-torn streets, Rassoul searches for the meaning of his crime. Instead he is pulled into a feverish plot thick with murder, guilt, morality and Sharia law, where the lines between fact and fiction, dream and reality, become dangerously blurred.
Blackly comic, with flashes of poetry as well as brilliant irony, Atiq Rahimi's latest novel is an ingenious recasting of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and a transgressive satire with a frightening resonance all its own.
I was approved of an ARC copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. This review in its entirety was originally posted at caffeinatedlife.net: http://www.caffeinatedlife.net/blog/2014/01/21/review-a-curse-on-dostoevsky/
A Curse on Dostoevsky is a very curious novel, sort of straddling between waking and dreaming. The novel is very internal and reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s infamous Crime and Punishment; the main character, Rassoul, from the very first page finds himself walking in Raskolnikov’s (notice that their names are similar) footsteps, undergoing a similar internal debate and torment. The internal struggles that Rassoul undergoes was probably my favourite aspect of the novel. It’s a bleak outlook, to be sure: over the course of the novel Rassoul finds himself falling into an abyss and the things he’s held on to–his fiancee, his family, his learnedness–fades away the further the reader delves into the novel. I wish events of this novel were a little clearer but the overall murkiness of Rassoul’s thoughts adds to the overall atmosphere of the novel.
