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    No Space for Further Burials
    No Space for Further Burials
    No Space for Further Burials
    Ebook215 pages3 hours

    No Space for Further Burials

    By Feryal Ali Gauhar

    4/5

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    A brutal and “fascinating” novel of an American held captive in an asylum in Afghanistan (Stewart O’Nan).
     
    Set in Afghanistan in 2002, No Space for Further Burials is a chilling indictment of the madness of war and our collective complicity in the perpetuation of violence. The novel’s narrator, a US Army medical technician in Afghanistan helping to “liberate” the country from the Taliban, has been captured by rebels and thrown into an asylum. The other inmates are a besieged gathering of society’s forgotten and unwanted refugees and derelicts, disabled and different, resilient and maddened, struggling to survive the lunacy raging outside the asylum compound. The novel becomes a powerful evocation of the country’s desolate history of plunder and war, waged by insiders and outsiders, all fueled by ideology, desperation, and greed.
     
    This astonishingly powerful story unfolds the tragedy of Afghanistan, as told by the captive narrator in hauntingly beautiful prose. While the characters try to cope with their individual destinies, the terrible madness of war is counterpointed with the poignancy of their lives and the narrator’s own peculiar predicament—the “victor” now a victim, his ambivalence a metaphor for everything Afghanistan symbolizes.
     
    “A novel of unrelenting truth held in transcendent prose and an exquisite grace. There is no easy redemption here, but there is light and more light.” —Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Song for Night
     
    “In writing through the eyes of an American captive in Afghanistan, Feryal Ali Gauhar has fashioned a fascinating two-way mirror in which we see the author creating an Other confronting Otherness. As in Richard Powers’ hostage novel Ploughing in the Dark, the mask of character reveals as much as it conceals.” —Stewart O’Nan, author of Songs for the Missing
     
    “An unbearably beautiful book, one you will not soon forget . . . What Gauhar shows us is that in a war there are only those who die and those who survive, and sometimes even those lines get blurred. And that’s what keeps you hungrily turning the pages.” —Radhika Jha, author of Smell

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateAug 17, 2010
    ISBN9781936070886
    No Space for Further Burials

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    Reviews for No Space for Further Burials

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    • 3/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Although the pedigree of Pakistani author Feryal Ali Gauhar is one you'd think naturally great for writing a political thriller -- a graduate of Montreal's McGill University, she has been imprisoned in her home country twice now for liberal activism, and currently serves as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations -- I nonetheless found myself rather disappointed by her fiction debut with our friends at Akashic Books, No Space for Further Burials. And that's because the rickety nature of her house-of-cards storyline is on obvious display right from page one, a needlessly convoluted plot that's just full of glaring holes in logic -- for example, even the main premise itself, that a US military officer would go wandering off into the desert one night by himself without telling anyone, thus allowing for his secret imprisonment in a forgotten rural mental hospital still run under medieval conditions, which then gives Gauhar the excuse she wanted for writing a Canterbury Tales-style look at the various misfits, disabled people and political prisoners found there -- all of this created just to make points that are too on-the-nose to begin with, and that could've been better made metaphorically in a simpler and more naturalistic setting. Although it's certainly as earnest as political fiction gets, I found it both too preachy and too precious for my tastes, and it is not recommended today to a general audience.Out of 10: 6.7
    • 4/5
      Afghanistan is seldom the region that inspires happy stories full of contentment and joy. This novel is no exception: it's startling and brutal and yet unlike most other stories that have similar themes. What makes it unique is the premise that it begins with, and the way the plot unfolds. Completely unpredictable, as the storyline you expect changes direction several times.It begins with a US soldier being captured by rebels in a mountainous region near his base. It's his own fault, curiousity got the best of him and he thought it would be safe to explore a bit. After being taken captive, he's placed in an insane asylum/hospital, a sort of drop-off place for injured civilians, orphaned children, and the mentally ill. While it previously had a Canadian doctor and nurses caring for these victims, they were gone now, the nurses captured and taken. Now it's nearly abandoned, cared for by a few Afghans who try to feed and comfort the residents with next to nothing.The soldier, unnamed, is distraught and eager to be rescued. His training as an EMT makes him helpful, yet he isn't trained to deal with the horrors he faces with the many inmates. He tries to adjust to the lack of food, clothing, or even a blanket; hiding in his cell when the inevitable raids take place. He finds that, while trained in an 'immersion' program to help soldiers in the region, he really has no idea what the religious and tribal people are really like."It's not just a question of not having a decent meal or proper bed to sleep in, or even the knowledge that nothing is certain here except death. What nags me most are the things we were taught before we arrived in this land, the tenets of war, the rules of engagement. I keep going over them in my head, the virtues of our coming here, the need to liberate these people, the absolute necessity of enduring freedom. Enduring. Freedom. Two words that don't mean anything to me anymore."The longer he's there, the likelihood of rescue slims, in fact, it's doubtful his fellow soldiers would even know where to look. He settles into the surreal environment: nearly everyone is crippled in some way, including the children. The soldier learns of religious traditions that harm women, and the senseless hate that includes brutalizing even the most helpless of children and the elderly. Besides the physical damage (burns, loss of limbs, blindness, and battle scars), many are mentally damaged as well. This is a region that is so highly volatile that no one family is intact: death is everywhere and even the youngest inmates are dulled in emotion. Suicide is an option many consider, in fact, that was the way out the Canadian doctor chose to escape. Staying alive, finding food, and digging graves is his new routine. Without a way to speak with the people, limited only to gestures and scratching in the dirt, he finds himself alone as never before:"I have come to understand what it means to live inside the landscape of one's own mind, where one can create an entire new world, keeping it secret from others. And I have also come to understand the silence of these people here, locked up in their own stories of loss and love and longing. I do not want to intrude into their thoughts, and have learned that the silence between the words they speak carries more than all the words I have ever spoken."As the story continues, he begins to refer to this strange mixture of people as his tribe. He begins to change as well, as he accepts his future in the harsh place. This is where the heart of the story is-who he was and who he is to become. It's a thoughtful story, but the brutality in points is hard to take. You are reminded throughout how evil and wicked humans can be to each other, and how fragile life is in any location. Note: Reading this may have an effect on how you interpret the nightly newscasts!

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    No Space for Further Burials - Feryal Ali Gauhar

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