The Swallows of Kabul

Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this extraordinary novel takes readers into the lives of two couples: Mohsen, who comes from a family of wealthy shopkeepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, who was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face. Intersecting their world is Atiq, a prison keeper, a man who has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq and is now dying of sickness and despair.
Desperate, exhausted Mohsen wanders through Kabul when he is surrounded by a crowd about to stone an adulterous woman. Numbed by the hysterical atmosphere and drawn into their rage, he too throws stones at the face of the condemned woman buried up to her waist. With this gesture the lives of all four protagonists move toward their destinies.
The Swallows of Kabul is a dazzling novel written with compassion and exquisite detail by one of the most lucid writers about the mentality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world. Yasmina Khadra brings readers into the hot, dusty streets of Kabul and offers them an unflinching but compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair.

Grown used to frequent executions under the Taliban, Mohsen Ramat's conscience no longer bothers him. The few women on the streets at any given time are specters, existing at the fringes of the crowd. Ramat and his wife have lost everything, their comfortable home and lifestyle, their freedom to wander through a marketplace that no longer exists. He wanders the city, while Zunaira stays inside, rather than endure the violence of the streets. Seduced by earlier, happy days, she agrees to walk with her husband. Accosted by the Taliban while on their walk, Zunaira is humiliated beyond endurance, her shame more painful because she understands the enormity of her loss.

After the incident, Zunaira looks upon her young husband as the enemy, those who roam the streets with whips, attacking passersby indiscriminately. Mohsen is, like them, a man. Zunaira refuses to remove her burqa inside their house, although her husband begs her, "Your face is the only sun I have left." Implacable, Zunaira cannot forgive. When he tries to remove the burqa, she resists and they struggle. Tragedy ensues and Zunaira's fate is sealed by the dictates of the land.

Atiq Shaukat, the jailer in charge of guarding prisoners before execution, nurses his own discontent under the deadening rule of the Taliban. Atiq drifts between his dingy office and home. The boredom of his daily life leeches out all feeling and memory, all desire. When Zunaira is brought into the prison, Atiq falls in love. Atiq is so warped by unhappiness that he doesn't realize the agony he is experiencing is love. It falls to his ailing wife to explain the meaning of his strange new emotion.

The Swallows of Kabul is a scathing indictment of a world turned to stone, where life has become uninhabitable. With women's compassion extracted from their society, men's hearts have hardened, left with only despair, arrogance and religious extremism. This small book marks a rapid descent from discontent into hell. Like the missing swallows, the bearers of hope are sentenced to endless days of mourning, covered in colors of "fever and fear". (The author, Mohamed Moulessehoul, an Algerian army officer, used a pseudonym to avoid the oversight of his manuscript by the military censors.) Luan Gaines/2004.


Keep looking   April 10, 2004
K. McHugh (Buffalo, NY USA)
15 out of 28 found this review helpful

I heard an interview with the author on NPR which piqued my interest in this story. I requested it at my local library. When I curled up to read, I was shocked and actually appalled by the first sentence, which I'll reproduce here: "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" (1). If this sentence doesn't make you roll your eyes and check your calendar to see if it's overuse of adjectives and bad similie day, then you may like this book. I don't know if it's was "lost in translation," but I couldn't get past the distracted writing.


Misery . . .   May 20, 2006
Ronald Scheer (Los Angeles)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

The reference to swallows in the title of this remarkable novel is to the burqa-clad women of Afghanistan during the years of the Taliban. Swathed in fabric from head to toe, they have been forced from public life and, as much as possible, rendered invisible, to preserve their "purity" and the honor of their families. The French-Algerian author, Khadra, heightens the incomprehensibility of this kind of faith-based segregation of genders even further by beginning and ending his story with the public executions of two women, one for alleged adultery and the other for the alleged murder of her husband.

Between these two incidents, the story follows the daily lives of several characters living out lives of soul-crushing misery in the doomed and ruined city of Kabul. There is a jail keeper, a university-educated man, an aged man who dreams of escape, and a Kalashnikov-carrying militiaman who turns a blind eye to the inhumanity he witnesses and looks only for opportuniies to advance his own career. It is a violent, Orwellian world where empathy has died and only the self-serving survive.

Both spare and unsparing, Khadra's writing brings to mind the stark, unsentimental vision of Camus' "The Stranger." The book is a bleak portrayal of exteme Islamic fundamentalism and as such seems intended as a heart-rending call of compassion for those in war-devastated regions, who are trapped by its worst excesses.