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Disappearing Into Flight

Asef Soltanzadeh,

Peter Campbell Bensted (Translation)

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Feb 16, 2022 Tony rated it it was ok

Shelves: project-fit, translated-fiction, short-stories, setting-asia

I picked this up in my attempts to find Afghan fiction in English by writers other than Khaled Hosseini and Atiq Rahimi. Soltanzadeh grew up in Kabul and after being arrested by the Soviet-backed authorities multiple times, fled in 1985 at age twenty. He then lived in exile in Tehran for almost two decades before settling in Denmark. This collection of eight short stories was originally written in 2000, and took a little more than a decade to appear in English. The translation itself is somewhat I picked this up in my attempts to find Afghan fiction in English by writers other than Khaled Hosseini and Atiq Rahimi. Soltanzadeh grew up in Kabul and after being arrested by the Soviet-backed authorities multiple times, fled in 1985 at age twenty. He then lived in exile in Tehran for almost two decades before settling in Denmark. This collection of eight short stories was originally written in 2000, and took a little more than a decade to appear in English. The translation itself is somewhat hard to evaluate, as the prose is pretty flat and unadorned, and it's hard to know to what extent there was any style to the original writing. The stories themselves are about as bleak as you'd expect, given the author's background.
In the title story, the protagonist shares the author's background as an Afghan refugee in Tehran.

Learning of a parent's death in Kabul. In his grief he tries to flee in order to avoid any further tragic news, only to be turned away at the city limits of Tehran, due to restrictions upon refugee movement. It's an effective piece of writing on grief, if a little confusing at times. Soltanzadeh has said that his stories set in post-Soviet occupation Afghanistan are based on the experiences of those he's talked to. In "The Two of Clubs." a Pashtun man falls asleep on the bus on the way home and inadvertently wakes up in a neighborhood controlled by Hazaras, and is captured by a militia. The militia leader decides that a card game of nowrang/nawrang (similar to rummy) will decide whether the man lives or dies.

In "All the Way to Mazar", the relatives of dead man must contend with his wishes to be buried at the Hazrat Ali shrine in Mazar (not to be confused with the more prominent Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, Iraq) but must balance the desire to honor a father's last wish with the reality of factional fighting in the valley they must cross. And when they do make it, they are subject to the Kafkaesque attentions of newly arrived Taliban, who insist on whipping the corpse for not having a beard. It reminded me somewhat of the Syrian novella, "Death is Hard Work" -- about a group of brothers crossing war-torn Syria to bury their father on their ancestral land.

The destitution of Kabul's citizens is another running theme. "The Royal Banquet" is a macabre vignette of a father who has sold virtually every possession he has, and has two final things to offer the world before starving. It's almost like an episode of the old "Twilight Zone" TV show, but most readers will likely have guessed at its grim revelation well before the end. "We Are All Lost" imagines a couple -- the husband crippled in a rocket attack and his wife whose only resource is to turn to the world's oldest profession if they are to get the medicine he needs.

My favorite story was "Baba the Magician" -- in which a venerable Kabul street magician becomes involved in a duel with a young man while a Sovet occupier looks on. It then takes a rather supernatural turn that has obvious metaphorical meaning, but was the one moment in the book that was surprising and memorable. On the whole, it's not a great set of stories, but possibly worth a look by readers with a deep interest in Afghanistan, and Kabul in particular.

Note: This book was produced by a firm that provides self-publishing services, specializing in works in Persian and Farsi, and it shows. While the cover is nicely designed, the text is clumsily formatted, and the book is riddled with typographical errors that a simple spellcheck or read would have caught. ...more

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