Book review: The Patience Stone

Published on Friday 5 February 2010 18:07

The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi Chatto & Windus, 136pp, £12.99

A MAN lies on the floor. His eyes are open but he is unconscious and hasn't moved or given sign of life for days. He is attached to a drip. His wife sits on the floor beside him and talks, but he gives no sign that he hears what she is saying. Every now and then she lubricates his eyes and fills the bag with the solution that is keeping him alive, or in suspension between life and death.

At other times she prays, reciting the 99 names of God. He has been a soldier, a hero of the Resistance, and is badly wounded. Outside there is the sound of tanks and sometimes gunfire. The couple have two little girls. For safety they are often confined to the cellar. We are somewhere in Afghanistan.

This novel won the Prix Goncourt in 2008. Atiq Rahimi, Afghan himself, wrote it in French rather than Dari because, he says, "a kind of involuntary self-censorship has come into play" whenever he has written in his native language.

"My acquired language, the one I have chosen, gives me a kind of freedom to express myself, away from this self-censorship and an unconscious shame that dwells in us from childhood." Writing in French has enabled him to present the woman as a sexual being, thus breaching a powerful Afghan taboo. Much of the novel is made up of the words the woman throws at her seemingly lifeless husband, and of her thoughts.

She is no plaster saint or mother-figure but a richly complicated person, devoted certainly to what she conceives as her duty, but also angry, resentful and often afraid. It is a wholly convincing portrait, and a moving one.

She develops in the course of the novella too. Its title – The Patience Stone – is taken from an Afghan legend in which the stone absorbs the pain and grief of all who confess to it. But she gets beyond that.

Her confession of her own fears, anger and resentment – resentment of the man lying there too and all that he represents of male indifference and brutality – is transmuted into a fierce diatribe against war, against the attitudes of men, against the religious, marital and cultural restrictions that are placed on Afghan women, reducing them to mere chattels who must suffer without remedy and endure without complaint.

The longer she talks, the more we know her and come to understand her frustrations, come to feel, like her, that she has lived her life in a prison which denies her the expression of what she truly is.

We rarely move from the room, though the woman sometimes ventures of necessity into the dangerous streets. One night while she is absent, armed men enter the room in search of loot. But most of the time we hear only echoes of the war – the causes and course of which we never learn. But this conflict is the third character in the story, outside the room, yet never possible to be forgotten.

The man lying on the floor engaged in it with enthusiasm, as evidence of his virility. Now, whether he can hear them or not, he has to endure his wife's reproaches and her confessions which, as she knows with some satisfaction, would bring shame to him. And then two other men with guns come into the room, and the drama tightens and intensifies.

This is a remarkable novel, written with a beautiful lucidity which is, I suspect, even more impressive in French. (That said, the translation by Polly McLean seems to me very good and natural.) It may be read as an allegory, reflections on the state of Afghanistan and the condition of women there.

But this makes it sound as if it might be a political or sociological tract, and it is neither of these things – or rather, to the extent that it contains them, it is something much more. It is an intense drama in which a hitherto hidden life is slowly, rivetingly and memorably laid open and bare. It explores fundamental questions: love, sex, marriage, war and the repression entailed by a demanding religion. Rahimi gives his heroine a voice to speak the woes and indignities suffered by tens of thousands of women in the Muslim world, who have been marginalised, maltreated, and condemned to silence and endurance.

It is not a book that anyone will read for easy pleasure or relaxation – though it is so well written that the reading offers a deep aesthetic delight. But it is a book which achieves what imaginative literature can provide better than any art form: it makes you think and feel at the same time.