For two decades, Zeba
was a loving wife, a patient mother, and a peaceful villager. But her
quiet life is shattered when her husband, Kamal, is found brutally
murdered with a hatchet in the courtyard of their home. Nearly catatonic
with shock, Zeba is unable to account for her whereabouts at the time
of his death. Her children swear their mother could not have committed
such a heinous act. Kamal’s family is sure she did, and demands justice.
Barely escaping a vengeful mob, Zeba is arrested and jailed.Awaiting trial, she meets a group of women whose own misfortunes have led them to these bleak cells: eighteen-year-old Nafisa, imprisoned to protect her from an “honor killing”; twenty-five-year-old Latifa, a teen runaway who stays because it is safe shelter; twenty-year-old Mezghan, pregnant and unmarried, waiting for a court order to force her lover’s hand. Is Zeba a cold-blooded killer, these young women wonder, or has she been imprisoned, like them, for breaking some social rule? For these women, the prison is both a haven and a punishment; removed from the harsh and unforgiving world outside, they form a lively and indelible sisterhood.
Into this closed world comes Yusuf, Zeba’s Afghan-born, American-raised lawyer whose commitment to human rights and desire to help his homeland have brought him back. With the fate this seemingly ordinary housewife in his hands, Yusuf discovers that, like the Afghanistan itself, his client may not be at all what he imagines.
Comment: The theme for August of the TBR Challenge is random pick. This seems a good euphemism for "anything you choose" and I'm curious to check other participant's posts and see how they interpreted this theme. For me, the random pick was something a little different from the usual contemporaries and historicals I tend to gravitate the most to.
I chose this because I was also buddy reading it with my friend H. but I've got to say this wasn't exactly what I imagined it would be by the blurb.
In this novel, the author introduces us to Zeba, a woman in Afghanistan who is accused of murdering her husband. She is taken into prison, refuses to explain why she did it and she is given a lawyer to help with her defense. While in prison, Zeba learns many things about her family, her own self and the simple fact her conscience is the most personal things she can have.
The fellow female inmates she meets also cause an impact on her but her children, so affected by the tragedy, are left to be taken care of by her late husband's family.
Is Zeba telling the truth, did she not kill her husband? Or if she did, why would she do it? This is an intriguing story of love, dignity and honoring one's beliefs.
On paper, this novel had everything to work out: a likable heroine, a different setting to allow the readers to access a bit of a new culture, a worthy campaign to defend a woman without rights, characters motivated by what they have been brought up to believe... the problem for me was mostly due to pacing and my difficulty to enjoy reading about the characters.
What fascinated me the most about this book was the prose. This is the first time I try something by the author but I did like how she told the story, how poetic some passages were and how one could imagine the Afghanistan she described. It's a bit difficult though, because of what we see on television, with so much destruction and desolation, but her words made me imagine a different reality, where things could be as standard as in any other country.
However, at the same time the prose was beautiful, some passages and their descriptions were boring. The book is long enough because some situations just drag and I don't mean Zeba's legal issues that we know would always take a long time to be solved, just as they do in western countries. I mean how each situation is excessively explained and developed to the point where I felt the "hidden messages" if one want to call it that, were lost because the reader couldn't really take time to think about them.
Some situations dragged and were boring to read and I think another issue here is the attempt to make this story more literary than it had to. I guess if this was just a contemporary novel about Zeba, mixed with the inevitable (and desired!) cultural references/settings this could have been so much richer. But with the - I suppose - need to write in a more polished manner at times, things just felt out of place.
The cultural aspects were probably my favorite detail, at the same time they are so unfair and frustrating to read about. I think everyone knows the life for women in some countries is just not fair and justice is still done in such a unimpressive way that I often felt like going there and shake everyone and make them see reason! How frustrating indeed.
Zeba and the other imprisoned women embodied how things are perceived there and many are in prison for reasons we would never consider right or equitable in our "free" countries. I think this aspect of the story was well achieved, as was the attempt of the lawyer to do right by his client but the way of things, the "rules" of the honor system of that country that sees women as weak and not equal to men is a punch in the face for how difficult it is to fight fairly for justice.
Zeba's character is intriguing but I almost felt like she was the role model to a situation rather than a character whose personality I would be interested in nor someone I could imagine meeting in real life. Yes, she is an idea of someone who could live there and go through that complicated process but I still managed to maintain my distance from who she was.
The secondary characters weren't fleshed out as I imagined. We were told about them and their hopes, dreams, experiences but very rarely I felt I was connecting with them.
Since the book was more on the lines of literary work rather than romance or mainstream fiction, the end surprised me because it was not very realistic in regards to what had happened so far. I'm glad things ended up relatively well but but at that point I expected a bigger climax and things were solved in a unlikely fashion, I'd say. The writing is beautiful and evocative in the last chapter but... this was not as absorbing as I imagined when the story begun.
Grade: 6/10
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