A Curse on Dostoevsky - Couverture rigide

Rahimi, Atiq

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0701187182 ISBN 13 : 9780701187187

Editeur : Chatto & Windus, 2013

A propos du livre

Extrait

The moment Rassoul lifts the axe to bring it down on the old woman’s head, he thinks of Crime and Punishment. He is thunderstruck. His arms shake; his legs tremble. And the axe slips from his hands. It splits open the old woman’s head, and sinks into her skull. She collapses without a sound on the red and black rug. Her apple-blossom patterned headscarf floats in the air before landing on her fat, flabby body. She convulses. Another breath, perhaps two. Her staring eyes fix on Rassoul standing in the middle of the room, not breathing, whiter than a corpse. His patou falls from his bony shoulders. His terrified gaze is lost in the pool of blood, blood that streams from the old woman’s skull, merges with the red of the rug obscuring its black pattern, then trickles toward the woman’s fleshy hand, which still grips a wad of notes. The money will be bloodstained.

Move, Rassoul, move!

Total inertia.

Rassoul?

What’s the matter with him? What is he thinking about? Crime and Punishment. That’s right—Raskolnikov, and what became of him.

But didn’t he think of that before, when he was planning the crime?

Apparently not.

Or perhaps it was that story, buried deep within, which incited him to murder.

Or perhaps...Or perhaps...what? Is this really the time to consider it? Now that he’s killed the old woman, he must take her money and jewels, and run.

Run!

He doesn’t move. He just stands there. Rooted to the spot, like a tree. A dead tree, planted in the flagstones of the house. Still staring at the trickle of blood that has almost reached the woman’s hand.

Présentation de l'éditeur

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.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Chatto & Windus
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0701187182
• ISBN 13: 9780701187187
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 272