Rahimi’s heroine is brave, resilient, a devout mother, but she is also flawed in fundamentally human ways, a woman capable of lying, manipulating, of being spiteful, a creature that, pushed hard enough, bares her teeth. And her body. Here, Rahimi has broached a great Afghan taboo, the notion of a woman as a sexual being. A pair of passages in this novel may very well generate protest from the more conservative sectors of the Afghan community, but Rahimi is to be applauded for not shying away from the subject. He is to be commended for not turning his heroine into the archetype of the saintly, asexual, maternal figure. Perhaps, writing this novel in French, and not in Dari, made it easier for him. He has been quoted as saying, “… a kind of involuntary self-censorship has come into play when I’ve written in Persian. 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.” Whatever the reason, the reader benefits from his unflinching approach.

It is also a testament to Rahimi’s considerable literary skills how vividly the war on the streets is depicted, even though the entire tale unfolds within the confines of a single bedroom. The specter of the unnamed conflict, fought between never named factions, is the third character in the room. Rahimi chooses to not take us to the streets. Instead, we experience war as most helpless civilians do. We hear the sudden bursts of gunfire, the screams, the terrifying silences. We feel the impact of mortar fire when the room shakes and plaster flakes rain down. Despite never taking us to the streets-or perhaps because of it-Rahimi succeeds in making us experience the chaos, the helplessness, the senseless brutality committed with impunity, the random and sudden outbursts of violence that take unsuspecting lives. The years of factional infighting were some of the darkest of the last thirty years in Afghanistan, and in Rahimi’s spare prose, the era comes to life to devastating effect.