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  • Published: 15 August 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448105205
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

A Curse on Dostoevsky




Dostoevsky on the wartorn streets of Kabul: an ambitious, daring and powerful recasting of Crime and Punishment, set in late twentieth-century Kabul, from Goncourt-prizewinning author and film-maker, Atiq Rahimi

For every crime, there must be a punishment…

Rassoul’s world consists of little more than a squalid rented room – strewn with books by Dostoevsky, relics from his days as a student of Russian Literature at Leningrad – and his beloved fiancée Sophia, for whom he would do anything.

So when he finds himself committing a murder, axe in hand, as if re-enacting the opening of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, his identification with the novel’s anti-hero is complete: Rassoul is Raskolnikov, transplanted to late twentieth-century Kabul. Amid the war-torn streets, Rassoul searches for the meaning of his crime. Instead he is pulled into a feverish plot thick with murder, guilt, morality and Sharia law, where the lines between fact and fiction, dream and reality, become dangerously blurred.

Blackly comic, with flashes of poetry as well as brilliant irony, Atiq Rahimi's latest novel is an ingenious recasting of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and a transgressive satire with a frightening resonance all its own.

  • Published: 15 August 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448105205
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Atiq Rahimi

Born in Afghanistan in 1962, Atiq Rahimi fled to France in 1984. There he has made a name as a writer, film and documentary maker of exceptional note. The film of his first novel, Earth and Ashes, was in the Official Selection at Cannes, 2004. Since 2001, he has returned to Afghanistan many times to set up a Writers' House in Kabul and offer support and training to young writers and film-makers. His novel The Patience Stone won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. He lives in Paris.

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Praise for A Curse on Dostoevsky

Atiq Rahimi brilliantly re-imagines Crime and Punishment and, in a daring feat of creative panache, transplants Dostoevsky’s classic morality tale to modern-day Afghanistan. This is easily Rahimi’s most imaginative and complex work yet, and should cement his reputation as a writer of great and unique vision.

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

This book is a novel of the exterior, which breathes the very dust of Kabul, the geography, both personal and political, of its alleys and districts… Welcome to Kabul, [a place] with faith but without laws.

Livres Hebdo

This is more a novel to chew over than gobble down

Anthony Cummins, Sunday Telegraph
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