Yasmina Khadra: The Swallows of Kabul

“Stunning. . [Khadra] conveys the physical deprivations and humiliations with a few startling details, but the book’s most devastating sections explore the mental damage of living under such terror. . [This] novel is a surgical strike against fundamentalism more penetrating than anything the Pentagon could devise.”

— The Christian Science Monitor

“Yasmina Khadra’s Kabul is hell on earth, a place of hunger, tedium, and stifling fear.”

— J. M. Coetzee, winner of the

2003 Nobel Prize for Literature

“A brief, despairing novel. . Khadra’s prose is gentle and precise. . Makes a powerful point about what can happen to a man when ‘the light of his conscience has gone out.’ ” —The New Yorker

“Chilling. . Powerful, surreal. . A meditation on the ultimate sacrifice of love. . [Khadra] expertly reveals the breakdown of human relations in a repressive society.”

— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“I am so grateful that The Swallows of Kabul has been written, and written with such relentless poetry and passion. . [It] once more proves the power of fiction to turn our despair into hope, to restore our stolen sense of dignity and humanity, and to desire life when death seems to be the safest refuge.”

— Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Places the reader not only inside the daily rhythms of Kabul but trapped, as well, beneath a woman’s burqa. . Khadra exemplifies the novelist’s gift: he bestows an emotional life and voice on those who have been alienated and silenced. . [ The Swallows of Kabul ] is a necessary advance, taking us deeper into this world than the reportage we have seen for so long now.”

— The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

“Khadra writes with economy, saying a lot with a little. . His style is as spare and flinty as the craggy hills that surround the city. . The Swallows of Kabul is for readers who wish to explore despair’s deepest shadows.” — The Baltimore Sun

“Powerful. . Communicates a sense of urgency, as if its creator knew he was on the verge of being found out. . What gives The Swallows of Kabul its momentum is the sense of conviction it brings to its most dramatic moments.” — The Oregonian

“Riveting. . Thrilling, horrifying. . Khadra’s snapshots of Kabul are the stuff of Dante’s In ferno.” —The Columbus Dispatch

“[A] wrenchingly beautiful novel. . [Khadra’s] strength as a writer lies in his precisely passionate phrases, his psychological probings, and the gnarled and twisted relationships he conjures up between endless war and relentless theocracy. There is a lyrical starkness to his prose that you just want to read out loud to capture its searing rhythms and perfect cadences. . This is a brilliant, resolute, elegiac novel that not only hurts but, in the sheer beauty of its style, also exhilarates and creates sublimely tragic moments you will never forget.”

— The Providence Journal

“Brilliant. . Accomplished. . [Khadra’s] portrait of the Afghan tragedy is unflinching, his lean prose and storytelling skills unimpeachable. . The bleak portrayal of life under the Taliban contained in this brief, straightforward narrative musters the complexity and moral impact of a much bigger book.” — South Florida Sun-Sentinel

IN THE MIDDLE of nowhere, a whirlwind spins like a sorceress flinging out her skirts in a macabre dance; yet not even this hysteria serves to blow the dust off the calcified palm trees thrust against the sky like beseeching arms. Several hours ago, the night, routed by the dawn and fleeing in disorder, left behind a few of its feeble breezes, but the heat has scorched and smothered them. Since midday, not a single raptor has risen to hover above its prey. The shepherds in the hills have disappeared. For miles around, apart from a few sentries crouched inside their rudimentary watchtowers, there is not a living soul. A deathly silence pervades the dereliction as far as the eye can see.

The Afghan countryside is nothing but battlefields, expanses of sand, and cemeteries. Artillery exchanges shatter prayers, wolves howl at the moon every night, and the wind, when it breathes, mingles beggars’ laments with the croaking of crows.

Everything appears charred, fossilized, blasted by some unspeakable spell. Erosion grinds away with complete impunity, scratching, rasping, peeling, cobbling the necrotic soil, erecting monuments to its own calm power. Then, without warning, at the foot of mountains singed bare by the breath of raging battles, rises Kabul, or rather, what’s left of it: a city in an advanced stage of decomposition.

The cratered roads, the scabrous hills, the white-hot horizon, the pinging cylinder heads all seem to say, Nothing will ever be the same again . The ruin of the city walls has spread into people’s souls. The dust has stunted their orchards, blinded their eyes, sealed up their hearts. In places, the buzzing of flies and the stench of animal carcasses declare the irreversibility of the general desolation. It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here , from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men.

Nobody believes in miraculous rains or the magical transformations of spring, and even less in the dawning of a bright new tomorrow. Men have gone mad; they have turned their backs on the day in order to face the night. Patron saints have been dismissed from their posts. Prophets are dead, and their ghosts are crucified even in the hearts of children. .

And yet it is also here, amid the hush of stony places and the silence of graves, in this land of dry earth and arid hearts, that our story is born, like the water lily that blooms in a stagnant swamp.

ATIQ SHAUKAT flails about him with his whip, trying to force a passage through the ragged crowd swirling around the stalls in the market like a swarm of dead leaves. He’s late, but he finds it impossible to proceed any faster. It’s like being inside a beehive; the vicious blows he deals out are addressed to no one in particular. On souk day, people act as if in a trance. The throng makes Atiq’s head spin. In thicker and thicker waves, beggars arrive from the four corners of the city and compete with carters and onlookers for hypothetically free spaces. The porters’ effluvia and the emanations of rotting produce fill the air with an appalling stench, and a burden of relentless heat crushes the esplanade. A few spectral women, segregated inside their grimy burqas, extend imploring hands and clutch at passersby; some receive a coin for their trouble, others just a curse. Often, when the women grow too insistent, an infuriated lashing drives them backward. But their retreat is brief, and soon they return to the assault, chanting their intolerable supplications. Others, encumbered by brats whose faces are covered with flies and snot, cluster desperately around the fruit vendors, interrupting their singsong litanies only to lunge for the occasional rotten tomato or onion that an alert customer may discover at the bottom of his basket.

“You can’t stay there!” a vendor shouts at them, furiously brandishing a long stick above their heads. “You’re bringing my stall bad luck, not to mention all kinds of bugs.”

Atiq Shaukat looks at his watch and clenches his teeth in anger. The executioner must have arrived a good ten minutes ago, and he, Atiq, is still dawdling in the streets. Exasperated, he starts hitting out again, wielding his many-thonged whip in an effort to part the flood of humanity, futilely harrying a group of old men as insensible to his blows as they are to the sobs of a little girl lost in the crowd. Then, taking advantage of the opening caused by the passage of a truck, Atiq manages to squeeze into a less turbulent side street and hastens, despite his limp, toward a building that stands oddly upright amid an expanse of rubble. Formerly a clinic, but fallen into disuse and long since ransacked by phantoms of the night, the building is used by the Taliban as a temporary prison on the occasions when a public execution is to take place in the district.