The award of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, to Afghan author last November raises intriguing questions about the international profile of Afghan and other non-western fiction, writes David Tresilian One of the surprise bestsellers on international fiction lists over recent years has been the Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner, described in material on the author's website as a "beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul." In this novel Hosseini "gives us hope," the website text goes on, "through its faith in the power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows for redemption." First published in 2003, The Kite Runner was made into a successful film four years later, with the Egyptian actor Khaled Abdalla playing the lead role of Amir, an expatriate Afghan living in California and bearing more than a slight resemblance to Hosseini himself. The novel has been on the New York Times bestseller list for several years, and according to Hosseini's website it is now available in 42 languages. This success was repeated in 2007 when a second novel by Hosseini, also Afghan-themed, appeared. This novel, entitled A Thousand Splendid Suns and the story of several generations of Afghan women, was "number one on nearly every national bestseller list" in the United States when it was published in 2007. Anyone scanning the literary pages of the British newspapers at the end of last year will have seen that Hosseini's two books were numbers two and three on the British 2008 bestseller lists, and anyone undertaking international travel over the past few years will also have seen the piles of both The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns heaped up on airport bookstalls. Hosseini's publishers use the language of soap opera to describe his novels ("a deeply moving story of family, friendship, and love"), but their extraordinary international success also raises intriguing questions about the ways in which the international fiction market is able to promote material that can apparently be found on sale almost anywhere in the world. It also raises questions about the place of Afghan materials, or of materials originating outside the western world, within it. Why, any number of expatriate Afghan or other non-western writers based in the United States or in other western countries must have asked themselves, has Hosseini enjoyed such success with these tales of his homeland worked up in English? Why Hosseini and why not me? Whatever the answers to these questions may be, another Afghan writer based in the West, , has recently scored a similar success with a novel based on Afghan material, though this time one written in French for francophone rather than for primarily English-speaking audiences. Rahimi, an expatriate Afghan writer and filmmaker living in France, won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, at the end of last year for his novel Syngué sabour, a Persian expression meaning "stone of patience," and this was enough to propel its previously obscure author to national celebrity and to provide his publishers with an unexpected financial windfall. Winning the Prix Goncourt in France, rather like winning the Booker Prize in Britain, can transform an author's fortunes, multiplying sales and making his or her reputation. Proust won the Goncourt for http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Proust A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs in 1919, and in the 1950s Simone de Beauvoir was able to establish her credentials as a novelist with Les Mandarins. Rahimi, who had previously published three other novels in his native Dari without any of them being noticed, has now become a fixture of the French media. He has been profiled in the newspapers and asked for his opinion on everything from the policies of the previous Taliban government in Afghanistan to the condition of Afghan asylum seekers camped out around Calais in northern France in their attempts to get across the Channel to Britain. His Goncourt-winning novel Syngué Sabour is a short work of 154 pages, though since the print is large and the pagination ample it would be more accurate to describe it as a long short story or short novella than a novel. Told almost entirely from the point of view of an unnamed Afghan woman, and sometimes directly reproducing her voice, it describes events in a house in Kabul during the civil wars that have consumed Afghanistan over the past three decades. A Taliban fighter, wounded in the wars, has withdrawn to the house to be looked after by his wife, whose thoughts constitute the substance of the narrative. This situation, placing an immobile, and apparently mostly unconscious, man in relation to his suddenly more mobile and certainly far more vocal wife, allows Rahimi to explore the ways in which the Afghan conflicts and the part played in them by the Taliban might be seen from a woman's point of view. It is a situation that is almost entirely devoid of drama, though Taliban soldiers do enter the house at one point, mistaking the wife for a prostitute. However, it is also one that can be used to reverse the more usual hierarchies, the wife's speech contrasting with the husband's silence as she goes about expressing herself before the "stone of patience" of the novel's title, in other words to her husband's immobile body. "Now I understand," she says, "what your father used to say about a sacred stone. It was towards the end of his life, and you were absent, having gone away again to the war. A few months ago, just before you were hit by that bullet, your father was unwell, and he only had me to take care of him. He was obsessed by a magic stone, a black stone, that he used to talk about all the time." "You know, the stone you put down in front of you and in front of which you can complain about your unhappiness, your suffering, pains, and misfortunes; the stone to which you can say everything that is in your heart and that you wouldn't dare reveal to anyone... You talk to it, and the stone listens, absorbing all your words and all your secrets until one fine day it shatters into pieces. On that day, you will be delivered from all your suffering and your pain." According to Le Monde in an editorial that appeared in the newspaper in November last year, the award of the Prix Goncourt to Syngué sabour demonstrated "to anyone who still thinks that France is stubborn about [accepting] diversity or who has doubts about the country's capacity to accept its mixed character" that these things are not the case. On the contrary, the newspaper went on, not only had the award of the Prix Goncourt to Rahimi and other awards like it shown France's capacity to welcome foreigners to its shores, but it had also shown the function of the French language, one of the most important vehicles of the European enlightenment, to allow such foreigners to speak in ways unavailable in their own native languages. Such authors, the paper said, which included Rahimi as well as the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun who won the Prix Goncourt in 1987 for his novel La Nuit sacrée, "have chosen to write in French in order to go beyond the taboos of their cultures of origin," in the case of Rahimi by allowing a woman to speak who has "otherwise been reduced to silence, almost to non-existence, by the Afghan burka." And so while the success of Hosseini's novels in English owes a lot, according to his publishers, to their emotional possibilities and their presentation of familiar family dramas against an otherwise exotic Afghan background, for the more intellectual readers of Le Monde Rahimi's success in French owes less to the emotional experiences his fiction offers and more to its indirect presentation of France as a country of tolerance and openness and of the French language as an international vehicle of free expression. There is a familiar lesson in all this for outside observers: while British and American audiences apparently like stories of emotional suffering and moral uplift, French ones are more likely to be intrigued by the conceptual possibilities offered by a given situation and like to be reminded, even indirectly, of their country's continued international standing. Hosseini's and Rahimi's novels certainly seem to have hit the right notes as far as western audiences are concerned. But perhaps the jury is still out regarding what their writings really have to say about Afghanistan. , Syngué sabour: pierre de patience, Paris: POL, 2008. pp154
