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The World Is A Carpet: Four Seasons In An Afghan Village (2013)

by Anna Badkhen(Favorite Author)

3.54 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1594488320 (ISBN13: 9781594488320)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Riverhead Hardcover

review 1: I found this volume to be thoroughly mediocre. While some describe the writing as poetic, to my ear it seemed more pretentious than anything else, and the episodic historical references were disjointed and random. I was excited about reading a personal, eyewitness account of life in Afghanistan, but in a way it almost felt the narrative became too personal. There is discussion of only a single tiny village, and sporadic anecdotes from other parts of the country. That didn't seem like enough to anchor an entire book, and the periodic musings about carpets were emphatically not a sufficient foundation to link the various pieces together.
review 2: I love the premise of the book. I love that the author spent time in a very, very remote northern Afghan village ... moreand wrote about it without condescension - and without hijacking the story to sing her own merits for taking the journey. I even love the running theme of weaving - weaving carpets, weaving lives, weaving a world. But I am very ambivalent about the author's ridiculously ornate word choice. The complex beauty of sparkling thesaurus words is most powerful when situated among more readable text. When every sentence is full of gems, the beauty becomes overwhelming and tedious. There's just no need to drown a reader this way, and I fear it undermines the simple beauty of the story. less

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