Book Review: Thousand Rooms of Dreams of Fear by Atiq Rahimi

Thousand Rooms of Dreams of Fear by Atiq Rahimi.

By: Ahmad Talha

“When you are dreaming, the dream reality always seems to be more real than reality itself.”

Chillingly unsettling, sporadically violent,chiastically poetic, and wincingly offensive, the novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dreams of Fear by Atiq Rahimi, starts with Farhad, an ordinary student, delirious, hungover, and beaten. His reality is fractured, eyes shut, and his identity lost both metaphorically and literally—as he is lying in a stranger’s house without his ID card. That stranger is Mahnaz, a woman whose husband was killed in jail, whose brother, who turned whitehaired has maddened himself at the war front, and whose son, Yahya, who awaits a father who will never return, presumes this estranged, nauseous Farhad as his returned father.

As Farhad opens his eyes, the story gradually becomes vivid and graphic. We, the audience, look at Farhad’s surroundings with him—the Fractured, Brutal, Oppressive World.
Farhad is being pursued by police, beaten last night for breaking the curfew. He is no revolutionary, just an alcoholic, who drank too much, and in his stupor wanted to return to his mother. His mother is an old woman who has been abandoned by her husband who took a younger wife and left his family to go to Pakistan.
So, all in all, the story evolves from absent fathers, loving grieving mothers, and a social fabric violently uprooted with no fertile ground left to reclaim it.
Farhad is both, awed and unnerved by this stranger, Mahnaz, who cradles her brother as if an infant in her lap and lets him suckle at her breasts.
Farhad’s mother arranges for Farhad to go to Pakistan, and roll in his household’s most expensive carpet after she is informed of her son’s situation by Mahnaz.
Rolled tightly in a carpet, his body bent and breath faltering, Farhad is smuggled toward Pakistan like a secret the world isn’t meant to hear. Darkness presses against his skin, the air growing thinner with every passing moment. Above him, two women sit in silence, their weight anchoring him deeper into suffocation. The world outside moves, indifferent to the struggle hidden within.
The end is as incoherent, vague, and hazy, as the start of the novel was.

The novel is written in poetic language, with a really good social and gender commentary. In opposition to selfish, violent, catatonic, and deceitful men, women are portrayed as heartbroken but strong characters who are weighing up the odds of living the losing battle against a crumbling warring world.
My rating: 4/5

For Short updates please visit our YouTube channel, Facebook, and Instagram.

About Author