Wasted Vigil , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Aslam Nadeem

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183 pages

English

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Marcus Caldwell, and English widower and Muslim convert, lives in an old perfume factory in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan. Lara, a Russian woman, arrives at his home one day in search of her brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared in the area many years previously, and who may have known Marcus's daughter. In the days that follow, further people arrive there, each seeking someone or something. The stories and histories that unfold, interweaving and overlapping, span nearly a quarter of a century and tell of the terrible afflictions that have plagued Afghanistan-as well of the love that can blossom during war and conflict.

Sujets

Islam

Musulman

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	02 novembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184003451
Langue	English

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Praise for The Wasted Vigil:
Beauty as well as terror in a polyphonic novel -Boyd Tonkin
I loved this novel It is wonderfully written and imagined-he has the most delightful eye for colors and textures, small gestures and human incomprehension. He knows what he is writing about and is impatient with ideologies and belief systems, while always patient with human weakness. The book changes the reader. Aslam is an important writer -A.S. Byatt, Financial Times Books of the Year
Remarkable Nadeem Aslam s stark, outraged, thoughtful novel, with its unsettling, sorrowing beauty, is a universal book Aslam confirms he is a writer of singular genius - Irish Times
Nadeem Aslam is a master of words and arresting image - The Times
What the reader finds, in Aslam s exquisitely written, gripping narrative is that although war destroys lives and shatters families, and people are capable of the greatest brutality, love and humanity will survive - Daily Mail
Marrying breathtakingly beautiful imagery with the ugly brutality of violence, Aslam navigates the troubled history of Afghanistan over the past two decades A brave, devastating book - Marie Claire
The power of this novel lies in the explosive adjacency of brutality and love, the poison of fanaticism diluted by the perfume of Persian lilacs When hope breaks through, it s blinding-a beam of life - Oprah Magazine
A book that confronts the most painful issues with compassion and humanity, and conveys them in prose of exceptional beauty - Metro
Aslam s unforgettable novel is a brilliant story ripped from the pages of current events. For contemporary writers have mixed such horror and humanity is so powerful a narrative - Outlook
A harrowing yet beautiful depiction of an Afghanistan mutilated by war and oppression With astonishing lyricism and compassion Aslam creates unforgettable characters while telling a story that is as gripping as it is affecting - Boston Globe
A searing, multifaceted novel Its polyglot characters inhabit seething cauldron of human drama - San Francisco Chronicle
Unafraid and political complexity, Aslam is also unflinching in his examination of depravity. Yet his writing also encompasses tenderness This novel seeks to reveal the psyche not just of one rural village or one immigrant community but of Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and Afghanistan. The revelations throughout are artful - New York Times Book Review
An intense, empathetic, magisterial interpretation of clashing beliefs and entwined fates, in a harsh and ruined, yet lovely place Complexity, beauty, violence and tragedy mark the pages of Aslam s affecting story The novel has insight and somber impact - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Kiriyama-winner Aslam takes an ambitious and moving look at the human cost of Afghanistan s war-torn reality An unflinchingly clear picture of a country whose history of strife is still being written - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Arguably the best novel available on the current situation in the Middle East. The jihadists, the warlords, the crusading Americans-all are given voice in calm, relentless, shatteringly beautiful prose that reveals the essential wrongness of the current conflict from every angle. There s no whitewash or caricature here, just authentic writing that delivers the world-and a range of extraordinary characters. Highly recommended - Library Journal (starred review)
by the same author
SEASON OF THE RAINBIRDS
MAPS FOR LOST LOVERS
Nadeem Aslam
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2012
First published by Faber and Faber Ltd in 2008
Copyright Nadeem Aslam 2008
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301 (UP)
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184003451
for Sohail and Carole
What is more important to the history of the world-the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? A few agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI , President Jimmy Carter s National Security Advisor, asked if he regretted having supported Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists , Le Nouvel Observateur, 15-21 January 1998
And the poet in his solitude turned towards the warlord a corner of his mind and gradually came to look upon him and held a converse with him.
DAULAT SHAH OF HERAT , Tazkirat-ush-Shuara , 1487
1. The Great Buddha
2. Building the New
3. Out of Separations
4. Night Letter
5. Street of Storytellers

6. Casabianca
7. The Silent Flutes
8. The Caliphate of New York
9. The Wasted Vigil
10. All Names Are My Names
Acknowledgements

HER MIND IS A haunted house.
The woman named Lara looks up at an imagined noise. Folding away the letter she has been rereading, she moves towards the window with its high view of the garden. Out there the dawn sky is filling up with light though a few of last night s stars are still visible.
She turns after a while and crosses over to the circular mirror leaning against the far wall. Bringing it to the centre of the room she places it face up on the floor, gently, soundlessly, a kindness towards her host who is asleep in an adjoining room. In the mirror she ignores her own image, examining the reflection of the ceiling instead, lit by the pale early light.
The mirror is large-if it was water she could dive and disappear into it without touching the sides. On the wide ceiling are hundreds of books, each held in place by an iron nail hammered through it. A spike driven through the pages of history, a spike through the pages of love, a spike through the sacred. Kneeling on the dusty floor at the mirror s edge she tries to read the titles. The words are reversed but that is easier than looking up for entire minutes would be.
There is no sound except her own slow breathing and, from outside, the breeze trailing its rippling robes through the overgrown garden.
She slides the mirror along the floor as though visiting another section of a library.
The books are all up there, the large ones as well as those that are no thicker than the walls of the human heart. Occasionally one of them falls by itself in an interior because its hold has weakened, or it may be brought down when desired with the judicious tapping of a bamboo pole.
A native of the faraway St Petersburg, what a long journey she has made to be here, this land that Alexander the Great had passed through on his unicorn, an area of fabled orchards and thick mulberry forests, of pomegranates that appear in the border decorations of Persian manuscripts written one thousand years ago.
Her host s name is Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman who has spent most of his life here in Afghanistan, having married an Afghan woman. He is seventy years old and his white beard and deliberate movements recall a prophet, a prophet in wreckage. She hasn t been here for many days so there is hesitancy in her still regarding Marcus s missing left hand. The skin cup he could make with the palms of his hands is broken in half. She had asked late one evening, delicately, but he seemed unwilling to be drawn on the subject. In any case no explanations are needed in this country. It would be no surprise if the trees and vines of Afghanistan suspended their growth one day, fearful that if their roots were to lengthen they might come into contact with a landmine buried near by.
She lifts her hand to her face and inhales the scent of sandalwood deposited onto the fingers by the mirror s frame. The wood of a living sandal tree has no fragrance, Marcus said the other day, the perfume materializing only after the cutting down.
Like the soul vacating the body after death, she thinks.
Marcus is aware of her presence regardless of where she is in the house. She fell ill almost immediately upon arrival four days ago, succumbing to the various exhaustions of her journey towards him, and he has cared for her since then, having been utterly alone before that for many months. From the descriptions she had been given of him, she said out of her fever the first afternoon, she had expected an ascetic dressed in bark and leaf and accompanied by a deer of the wilderness.
She said that a quarter of a century ago her brother had entered Afghanistan as a soldier with the Soviet Army, and that he was one of the ones who never returned home. She has visited Afghanistan twice before in the intervening decades but there has been proof neither of life nor of death, until perhaps now. She is here this time because she has learnt that Marcus s daughter might have known the young Soviet man.
He told her his daughter, Zameen, was no longer alive.
Did she ever mention anything? she asked.
She was taken from this house in 1980, when she was seventeen years old. I never saw her again.
Did anyone else?
She died in 1986, I believe. She had become a mother by then-a little boy who disappeared around the time she died. She and an American man were in love, and I know all this from him.
This was on the first day. She then drifted into a long sleep.
From the various plants in the garden he derived an ointment for the deeply bruised base of her neck, the skin there almost black above the right shoulder, as though some of the world s darkness had attempted to enter her there. He wished pomegranates were in se