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The World is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village
An unforgettable portrait of a place and a people shaped by centuries of art, trade, and war.
In the middle of the salt-frosted Afghan desert, in a village so remote that Google can’t find it, a woman squats on top of a loom, making flowers bloom in the thousand threads she knots by hand. Here, where heroin is cheaper than rice, every day is a fast day. B-52s pass overhead—a sign of America’s omnipotence or its vulnerability, the villagers are unsure. They know, though, that the earth is flat—like a carpet.
Anna Badkhen first traveled to this country in 2001, as a war correspondent. She has returned many times since, drawn by a land that geography has made a perpetual battleground, and by a people who sustain an exquisite tradition there. Through the four seasons in which a new carpet is woven by the women and children of Oqa, she immortalizes their way of life much as the carpet does—from the petal half-finished where a hungry infant needs care to the interruptions when the women trade sex jokes or go fill in for wedding musicians scared away by the Taliban. As Badkhen follows the carpet out into the world beyond, she leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of fates woven by centuries of art, war, and an ancient trade that ultimately binds the invaded to the invader.
In the middle of the salt-frosted Afghan desert, in a village so remote that Google can’t find it, a woman squats on top of a loom, making flowers bloom in the thousand threads she knots by hand. Here, where heroin is cheaper than rice, every day is a fast day. B-52s pass overhead—a sign of America’s omnipotence or its vulnerability, the villagers are unsure. They know, though, that the earth is flat—like a carpet.
Anna Badkhen first traveled to this country in 2001, as a war correspondent. She has returned many times since, drawn by a land that geography has made a perpetual battleground, and by a people who sustain an exquisite tradition there. Through the four seasons in which a new carpet is woven by the women and children of Oqa, she immortalizes their way of life much as the carpet does—from the petal half-finished where a hungry infant needs care to the interruptions when the women trade sex jokes or go fill in for wedding musicians scared away by the Taliban. As Badkhen follows the carpet out into the world beyond, she leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of fates woven by centuries of art, war, and an ancient trade that ultimately binds the invaded to the invader.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published May 30, 2013
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726 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
June 19, 2013
I was really looking forward to reading this book and I still think there's an interesting story there. But, I had to reject it and here's why...
"Oqa's forty doorless huts gaped at the world in a kind of hungry supplication from a low clay hummock. The hummock was shaped like a horseshoe with the heel pointing east northeast. A convex emptiness unfurled the village for infinite miles and curved toward the end of the Earth".
and
"The yoghurt bow of the moon had slipped beneath the Earth an hour earlier, and the trail wound invisibly through thick pre-dawn dark that arced toward the horizon...To the south the Big Dipper scooped out the mountains I could just skylight against the spongy, star-bejeweled March night'"
Convex emptiness! Yoghurt bow of the moon! Skylight as a verb! a spongy sky!
Really! What is she trying to do?
"Oqa's forty doorless huts gaped at the world in a kind of hungry supplication from a low clay hummock. The hummock was shaped like a horseshoe with the heel pointing east northeast. A convex emptiness unfurled the village for infinite miles and curved toward the end of the Earth".
and
"The yoghurt bow of the moon had slipped beneath the Earth an hour earlier, and the trail wound invisibly through thick pre-dawn dark that arced toward the horizon...To the south the Big Dipper scooped out the mountains I could just skylight against the spongy, star-bejeweled March night'"
Convex emptiness! Yoghurt bow of the moon! Skylight as a verb! a spongy sky!
Really! What is she trying to do?
July 17, 2014
The most unexpected, but rewarding, experience I had as a foreign correspondent was an opportunity to travel to Afghanistan and tell stories about the Afghans I met there. My trips were nothing like Anna Badkhen's, however. She spent the better part of a year in an "unmapped" Afghan village called Oqa, living amongst the villagers and getting to know them in a far deeper way than most journalists are able. She intersperses the story of Thawra, who is weaving the carpet in her hut in Oqa, with trips to Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul and with writings from historians, warriors and poets, adding depth to the story of her characters and of Afghanistan itself. My only quibble would be a tendency sometimes to go for the obscure word when a simple one would do. Partly it gives the book a poetic feel and, as a writer, I admired the vocabulary and the attention to detail she has made in phrasing the sentences just so. But sometimes the story itself got a bit lost - veering into albeit well-written travelogue, when what I wanted was to get back to the villagers in Oqa. All in all, a very worthwhile read.
September 25, 2013
The title seems to promise an intimate glimpse into a rare slice of life - a remote village in Afghanistan. And more, a journey through the creation of a beautiful handmade carpet. And since these carpets are woven solely by women, a narrative that focuses on their lives as they tend their families in this remote and primitive place and manage to create works of incredible skill and craft.
I was disappointed on all counts.
I never became engaged with any of the villagers and little is said of the women.
What we hear primarily are the boastful longings of the men who do little but spend their days wishing to leave for the "big city" and the decadence they hope to find there.
If I could describe this book as a carpet it would be one that is woven in clumps of wool, here and there with many gaping voids and no discernible pattern.
I was disappointed on all counts.
I never became engaged with any of the villagers and little is said of the women.
What we hear primarily are the boastful longings of the men who do little but spend their days wishing to leave for the "big city" and the decadence they hope to find there.
If I could describe this book as a carpet it would be one that is woven in clumps of wool, here and there with many gaping voids and no discernible pattern.
June 7, 2013
Ms. Badkhen brings her wanderlust, curiosity and considerable intelligence to bear on the subject of the small village of Oqa, a place so remote that it can’t be found on any map or even Google Earth. Here, life is ringed around by threats of distant warfare, skirmishes, foreign planes passing overhead, addiction, constant poverty and attendant hunger.
Ms. Badkhen does not posit these people as noble savages or proud foreigners who spit on Western imperialism. Without pity, condescension or accusation, a strange world gradually emerges from her pages. The constant, insane stupidity of warfare cannot squash the indelible spirit of Oqa’s villagers. They gather to share news, arrange marriages, feed their children and take their drugs to quiet hunger and assuage misery. The desert sun bakes them and withers them before their time. Yet their spirit shines and they manage joy and laughter. They are both like and unlike everybody else.
The story centers on a carpet that is being woven by one of the villagers. Done in the time-old tradition of her ancestors Thawra’s carpet is one that will take many months, almost a year, to complete and will yield a sum meager by Western standards but will constitute a minor windfall to her and her family. During the weaving of this carpet, it will incorporate figuratively every aspect of village life: here, a slipped knot will show where the weaver was distracted by a chicken, there. a flower will have one too few petals because she lost track of where she was weaving. The subtle change in coloration will show where she ran out of a certain hue of yarn and had to substitute another.
Thus, the novel is woven around and by the weavers, illuminating the changeable and unchanging nature of the village and its people. This is a small gem of a book, rife with life, vengeance, generosity, misery and poetry.
Ms. Badkhen does not posit these people as noble savages or proud foreigners who spit on Western imperialism. Without pity, condescension or accusation, a strange world gradually emerges from her pages. The constant, insane stupidity of warfare cannot squash the indelible spirit of Oqa’s villagers. They gather to share news, arrange marriages, feed their children and take their drugs to quiet hunger and assuage misery. The desert sun bakes them and withers them before their time. Yet their spirit shines and they manage joy and laughter. They are both like and unlike everybody else.
The story centers on a carpet that is being woven by one of the villagers. Done in the time-old tradition of her ancestors Thawra’s carpet is one that will take many months, almost a year, to complete and will yield a sum meager by Western standards but will constitute a minor windfall to her and her family. During the weaving of this carpet, it will incorporate figuratively every aspect of village life: here, a slipped knot will show where the weaver was distracted by a chicken, there. a flower will have one too few petals because she lost track of where she was weaving. The subtle change in coloration will show where she ran out of a certain hue of yarn and had to substitute another.
Thus, the novel is woven around and by the weavers, illuminating the changeable and unchanging nature of the village and its people. This is a small gem of a book, rife with life, vengeance, generosity, misery and poetry.
December 28, 2015
I wanted to like this book, but it felt like an over privileged woman giving herself a continual pat on the back for a job well done and bizarre, "look at me and how caring I am" under-tone. Additionally, her verbiage was strange, at best. There is a carpet, and a woman who makes it, and the narrative ties in the year long process with an expose into Afghan culture, from her perspective.
It wasn't a terrible book, but there are much better ones to be read.
It wasn't a terrible book, but there are much better ones to be read.
November 19, 2022
An insightful glimpse at a hard to reach, yet deeply connected part of the world. I love the way this narrative centers the town of Oqa that isn't marked on conventional maps -- and folds the rest of our world around it. The carpet is such a beautiful and rich object imbued with all kinds of symbolic meanings, and I love the way Badkhen goes beyond the metaphor of a carpet to the real thing, and invests the time and attention to investigate what all goes into making of it.
February 13, 2014
Yes, sometimes the world is a carpet, but mostly it’s not. This book is about a world that’s not.
You may think you have learned all about Afghanistan from the years our soldiers have spent time there, but this is not that Afghanistan. This is the Afghanistan experienced by the women who live there. The women who spend most of their days, most of their lives, making amazing carpets, beautiful carpets that will support their families, while their husbands escape this world with opium, while their children hunger.
Yes, the world is a carpet. But mostly it’s not.
You may think you have learned all about Afghanistan from the years our soldiers have spent time there, but this is not that Afghanistan. This is the Afghanistan experienced by the women who live there. The women who spend most of their days, most of their lives, making amazing carpets, beautiful carpets that will support their families, while their husbands escape this world with opium, while their children hunger.
Yes, the world is a carpet. But mostly it’s not.
January 11, 2017
From the beginning of the book Badkhen captured me with her prose that is peppered with 5 star words, e.g.:
"A memory that was the very essence of peregrination, a flawless distillation of our ancestral restlessness."
and the amazing experience that she was privileged to spend 4 seasons in a tiny desert village of Oqa – 40 cob huts of Turkomans near Mazar-e-Sharif in the north of Afghanistan. Badkhen has spent her adult life as a journalist in the war-wrecked hinterlands of Central Asia, Arabia, and Africa. As a result she does not mention, unless pertinent to the story, the privations of her time in an impoverished desert village or the difficulties of travelling daily through a region constantly at war, with multiple check-points and armed Taliban on motorbikes. Badkhen is sensitive and unjudging in the observations that she shares even of facets of life that we find difficult to empathise with. Badkhen only occasionally interferes in the lives of the families of Oqa (sometimes bringing food to her hosts, binoculars to the village Commander, and taking a sick baby to hospital) and exhibits deep affection for her male and female hosts. She talks about falling asleep holding hands with a 10 year old girl and her female relatives, the immense kindness of a host for covering her with a 2nd blanket, and the intense beauty of a warlord. She lives in the special world of the foreigner in Afghan society, rarely in purdah but instead normally dining with the men even occasionally sleeping (alone) in the men’s quarters. I loved her gentle depiction of the people that she encountered who despite the severe privations of daily life loved and cared for her. She has been going to Afghanistan since before ‘American warplanes dropped their first payload on Kabul in 2001’:
"Perhaps I had come back for this: the unobstructed sky, the resilient candor of my hosts who wove joy out of sorrow, the seductive contrast between the ancient and the modern, between the unspeakable violence and the inexpressible beauty."
In the home of Badkhen’s hosts, the daughter-in-law Thawra spends 7 months weaving a carpet (with morning sickness, a meagre diet, withdrawal from her normal daily dose of opium, an ever growing foetus, and a broken roof) by squatting on top of a horizontal loom built with two rusty lengths of iron pipe, cinder blocks and sticks. The yarn Thawra uses cost $70 USD and the dealer will buy the carpet for $200 USD. The profit will be used to buy the yarn for next year’s carpet and to keep the family of two grandparents (Baba Nazar and Boston), two parents (Amanullah and Thawra) and 3 children from freezing in the harsh winter and starving due to perpetual food shortages.
When standing atop the crumbled crenellations of Kafir Qaleh (built more than 2000 years ago by the Kushans):
"“What do you think about this place?” I asked Baba Nazar. “Do you like it?” I may as well have asked if he had loved his mother. For a few beats he studied me, to make sure he had heard me correctly, or else wondering what kind of creature I was, displaced, tribeless, uncouth. But Baba Nazar was a gracious man, and with me he was patient. He said: “This is my country. It is beautiful”.
Baba Nazar was seventy years old. I had met him a year earlier. He had been seventy years old already then. Nine months later I would ask again and he still would be seventy. Few Afghans knew how old they were: Who wanted to count the seasons of privation?"
Alexander the Great is said to have sent his mother a Turkoman carpet when he defeated Balkh (25 miles from Oqa), Marco Polo praised the Turkoman carpets as the ‘best and handsomest carpets in the world’.
"Of all the Afghan carpets, those woven by the Turkomans are the most valued… For their rich palette of reds – mahogany, terracotta, liver, and the atrorubent of the fratricidal blood that soaks their land – the Turkomans are called the Rembrandts of weaving."
When trying to explain where America is compared to Oqa, Afghanistan, Badkhen suggests that the world is round and if you go east or west and across the ocean you will eventually reach America. The village men laugh at this and say that America cannot be in two places at once:
“The world is not round. It is rectangular. There is Pakistan on one end. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on the other end. Iran over there. The world has four corners.” The world is a carpet."
According to a New York Times article:
"Long the global leader in opium production, Afghanistan has now also become one of the world’s most addicted societies. The number of drug users in Afghanistan is estimated to be as high as 1.6 million…among the highest rates in the world. Nationwide, one in 10 urban households has at least one drug user… In rural areas, the problem is expected to be worse. In some villages, the rate of drug use is as high as 30 percent of the population…There are just under 28,000 formal treatment slots available nationwide."
Opium is very cheap and use and abuse is ubiquitous and in Oqa children are allowed to begin taking it when they are 15 years old although most are given opium during infancy. it is believed that Alexander the Great brought opium to Afghanistan as a palliative for his troops. During Badkhen’s stay in Oqa one mother (who is addicted to opium) stops lactating and her malnourished and 40 day old baby is in poor health so Badkhen takes the baby to the nearest hospital. While there a 15 day old baby is brought to the hospital unconscious and dying of an opium overdose. His mother had been born addicted to opium and had given the baby opium that morning to hush his crying but must have miscalculated the dose. After he stopped breathing she took him to the hospital. When Badkhen relates this story to the villagers in Oqa the men laughed that this could not have happened in Oqa because:
"No-ho-ho…Here, we know the trick, how much opium to give a baby."
Really the only judgement that Badkhen expresses through this lovely book is to mention the damage that has been done by NATO forces since they (in her words) ‘invaded’ Afghanistan in 2001. This is a viewpoint shared by the Afghan President Hamid Karzai:
"The war on terror was not conducted where it should have been, which was in the sanctuaries and the training grounds beyond Afghanistan, rather than that the US and NATO forces were conducting operations in Afghan villages, causing harm to Afghan people. The years of combat caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering and a lot of loss of life and no gains because the country is not secure."
Last week the new Prime Minister of Australia announced the withdrawal of Australian troops from Afghanistan. The cost of the Australian presence in Afghanistan since 2001 has been more than $7.5billion AUD and in the aftermath, Tony Abbott in Afghanistan stated that Australia’s longest war had failed to secure victory:
"Afghanistan remains a dangerous place despite all that has been done"
A sign on the memorial to the fallen troops inside the Australian military Tarin Kot base reads, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” and how true this seems and pertinent to the sentiments of Badkhen in this excellent book.
I will end on a more uplifting note; the book is peppered by delightful interchanges, such as, when standing at the border to Turkmenistan with a young Mazari man and no visas to enter the country:
“I want to go across,” he whispered; “What would you do there?”; “Nightclubs. I miss nightclubs”; “Have you even been to a nightclub?”; “No” There are no nightclubs in Mazar-e-Sharif.; “Then how can you miss them?” “I saw it in film”
I first posted this review on my blog: https://strivetoengage.wordpress.com/...
"A memory that was the very essence of peregrination, a flawless distillation of our ancestral restlessness."
and the amazing experience that she was privileged to spend 4 seasons in a tiny desert village of Oqa – 40 cob huts of Turkomans near Mazar-e-Sharif in the north of Afghanistan. Badkhen has spent her adult life as a journalist in the war-wrecked hinterlands of Central Asia, Arabia, and Africa. As a result she does not mention, unless pertinent to the story, the privations of her time in an impoverished desert village or the difficulties of travelling daily through a region constantly at war, with multiple check-points and armed Taliban on motorbikes. Badkhen is sensitive and unjudging in the observations that she shares even of facets of life that we find difficult to empathise with. Badkhen only occasionally interferes in the lives of the families of Oqa (sometimes bringing food to her hosts, binoculars to the village Commander, and taking a sick baby to hospital) and exhibits deep affection for her male and female hosts. She talks about falling asleep holding hands with a 10 year old girl and her female relatives, the immense kindness of a host for covering her with a 2nd blanket, and the intense beauty of a warlord. She lives in the special world of the foreigner in Afghan society, rarely in purdah but instead normally dining with the men even occasionally sleeping (alone) in the men’s quarters. I loved her gentle depiction of the people that she encountered who despite the severe privations of daily life loved and cared for her. She has been going to Afghanistan since before ‘American warplanes dropped their first payload on Kabul in 2001’:
"Perhaps I had come back for this: the unobstructed sky, the resilient candor of my hosts who wove joy out of sorrow, the seductive contrast between the ancient and the modern, between the unspeakable violence and the inexpressible beauty."
In the home of Badkhen’s hosts, the daughter-in-law Thawra spends 7 months weaving a carpet (with morning sickness, a meagre diet, withdrawal from her normal daily dose of opium, an ever growing foetus, and a broken roof) by squatting on top of a horizontal loom built with two rusty lengths of iron pipe, cinder blocks and sticks. The yarn Thawra uses cost $70 USD and the dealer will buy the carpet for $200 USD. The profit will be used to buy the yarn for next year’s carpet and to keep the family of two grandparents (Baba Nazar and Boston), two parents (Amanullah and Thawra) and 3 children from freezing in the harsh winter and starving due to perpetual food shortages.
When standing atop the crumbled crenellations of Kafir Qaleh (built more than 2000 years ago by the Kushans):
"“What do you think about this place?” I asked Baba Nazar. “Do you like it?” I may as well have asked if he had loved his mother. For a few beats he studied me, to make sure he had heard me correctly, or else wondering what kind of creature I was, displaced, tribeless, uncouth. But Baba Nazar was a gracious man, and with me he was patient. He said: “This is my country. It is beautiful”.
Baba Nazar was seventy years old. I had met him a year earlier. He had been seventy years old already then. Nine months later I would ask again and he still would be seventy. Few Afghans knew how old they were: Who wanted to count the seasons of privation?"
Alexander the Great is said to have sent his mother a Turkoman carpet when he defeated Balkh (25 miles from Oqa), Marco Polo praised the Turkoman carpets as the ‘best and handsomest carpets in the world’.
"Of all the Afghan carpets, those woven by the Turkomans are the most valued… For their rich palette of reds – mahogany, terracotta, liver, and the atrorubent of the fratricidal blood that soaks their land – the Turkomans are called the Rembrandts of weaving."
When trying to explain where America is compared to Oqa, Afghanistan, Badkhen suggests that the world is round and if you go east or west and across the ocean you will eventually reach America. The village men laugh at this and say that America cannot be in two places at once:
“The world is not round. It is rectangular. There is Pakistan on one end. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on the other end. Iran over there. The world has four corners.” The world is a carpet."
According to a New York Times article:
"Long the global leader in opium production, Afghanistan has now also become one of the world’s most addicted societies. The number of drug users in Afghanistan is estimated to be as high as 1.6 million…among the highest rates in the world. Nationwide, one in 10 urban households has at least one drug user… In rural areas, the problem is expected to be worse. In some villages, the rate of drug use is as high as 30 percent of the population…There are just under 28,000 formal treatment slots available nationwide."
Opium is very cheap and use and abuse is ubiquitous and in Oqa children are allowed to begin taking it when they are 15 years old although most are given opium during infancy. it is believed that Alexander the Great brought opium to Afghanistan as a palliative for his troops. During Badkhen’s stay in Oqa one mother (who is addicted to opium) stops lactating and her malnourished and 40 day old baby is in poor health so Badkhen takes the baby to the nearest hospital. While there a 15 day old baby is brought to the hospital unconscious and dying of an opium overdose. His mother had been born addicted to opium and had given the baby opium that morning to hush his crying but must have miscalculated the dose. After he stopped breathing she took him to the hospital. When Badkhen relates this story to the villagers in Oqa the men laughed that this could not have happened in Oqa because:
"No-ho-ho…Here, we know the trick, how much opium to give a baby."
Really the only judgement that Badkhen expresses through this lovely book is to mention the damage that has been done by NATO forces since they (in her words) ‘invaded’ Afghanistan in 2001. This is a viewpoint shared by the Afghan President Hamid Karzai:
"The war on terror was not conducted where it should have been, which was in the sanctuaries and the training grounds beyond Afghanistan, rather than that the US and NATO forces were conducting operations in Afghan villages, causing harm to Afghan people. The years of combat caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering and a lot of loss of life and no gains because the country is not secure."
Last week the new Prime Minister of Australia announced the withdrawal of Australian troops from Afghanistan. The cost of the Australian presence in Afghanistan since 2001 has been more than $7.5billion AUD and in the aftermath, Tony Abbott in Afghanistan stated that Australia’s longest war had failed to secure victory:
"Afghanistan remains a dangerous place despite all that has been done"
A sign on the memorial to the fallen troops inside the Australian military Tarin Kot base reads, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” and how true this seems and pertinent to the sentiments of Badkhen in this excellent book.
I will end on a more uplifting note; the book is peppered by delightful interchanges, such as, when standing at the border to Turkmenistan with a young Mazari man and no visas to enter the country:
“I want to go across,” he whispered; “What would you do there?”; “Nightclubs. I miss nightclubs”; “Have you even been to a nightclub?”; “No” There are no nightclubs in Mazar-e-Sharif.; “Then how can you miss them?” “I saw it in film”
I first posted this review on my blog: https://strivetoengage.wordpress.com/...
January 5, 2019
The only book I have yet to read that captures in thorough detail the bland and harsh life of rural Afghanistan. If you want to know what it’s like in the most remote areas without power, water, and rare heat, this book does a pretty good job of it. The author spent a year travelling Afghanistan living in the dim and small mud huts in places you can’t find on a map. The very few who’ve been there would relate to a lot of the details.
An interesting correlation between the US and these Afghani villagers. Several of the people in the book often fantasize about going to a city, living a better life, doing more, and escaping poverty. The overall obstacle they never overcome, fear. What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail? How would I do it? Yes my cousin made it out but I have x,y,z excuses etc. Living on a starvation diet of corn, bread, and camels milk; alleviating hunger pains with opium, most of them fail to pursue more for the same reason people here do. I thought that was pretty interesting, even though it wasn’t a theme in the book.
The book actually centers around a family that makes carpets for a living. It takes about an entire year to make one, and then they travel to the city and sell it for a few hundred dollars which will be the bulk of their income for the year. In turn by the time they reach Europe and America they’re selling for many thousands of dollars.
The author got a bit flowery in the language for my tastes but overall was a good book.
An interesting correlation between the US and these Afghani villagers. Several of the people in the book often fantasize about going to a city, living a better life, doing more, and escaping poverty. The overall obstacle they never overcome, fear. What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail? How would I do it? Yes my cousin made it out but I have x,y,z excuses etc. Living on a starvation diet of corn, bread, and camels milk; alleviating hunger pains with opium, most of them fail to pursue more for the same reason people here do. I thought that was pretty interesting, even though it wasn’t a theme in the book.
The book actually centers around a family that makes carpets for a living. It takes about an entire year to make one, and then they travel to the city and sell it for a few hundred dollars which will be the bulk of their income for the year. In turn by the time they reach Europe and America they’re selling for many thousands of dollars.
The author got a bit flowery in the language for my tastes but overall was a good book.
September 25, 2017
To read something about a place and culture that is completely new to me (Afghanistan) was refreshing and quite interesting. I learned a lot. It breaks my heart that women making carpets earn only about $1/day. And that most of the people there are starving and often so high on opium that their children are left unattended, unfed, suffering. Such hardships the people in Afghanistan have faced........ I thank my lucky stars that I live where I do.
The author has such a brilliant command of the English language that she can't help but create an art form with her words. Beautiful. And I felt challenged to often look up 2-3 words/page because I was unfamiliar. I love when that happens.
The book flows. It took longer for me to read because I was looking up word definitions, but I enjoyed the time it took. You can tell that the author is passionate about her travels and her expression of what she experiences.
The author has such a brilliant command of the English language that she can't help but create an art form with her words. Beautiful. And I felt challenged to often look up 2-3 words/page because I was unfamiliar. I love when that happens.
The book flows. It took longer for me to read because I was looking up word definitions, but I enjoyed the time it took. You can tell that the author is passionate about her travels and her expression of what she experiences.
September 13, 2019
Not sure how I really feel about the book- at times I found it to be quite depressing learning about the daily lives of these people in rural Afghanistan and at other times it showed a warm and loving group who opened their lives to the author. On one hand I kept wondering why in the world would a sane person want to spend a year away from their family to be in a place like this but I’m also appreciative of the window this provides. Was it a great book that kept my attention? No, but it is an example of why I am challenging myself to read a book from every shelf in my library so I force myself to read things I wouldn’t normally- it peeled back the veil on a mysterious and misunderstood area of the world.
September 11, 2018
Kudos to Ms Badkhen for her extensive vocabulary. She introduced me to words like crepuscule, vastation, maquillage and eldritch in relating her tale of the hardscrabble lives in the small forsaken Afghani village of Oqa where women support their families by weaving treasured carpets. Though technically only 30 miles from a major metropolitan center, the village remains decades distant in amenities. Oh that there was an accompanying National Geographic magazine full of photos to help drive home the hardships.
December 31, 2017
Maybe more of a 2.5. I did like it, but not a lot. As a weaver, I was hoping to have the story include even more about the weavers, and their life as they make these carpets. As well as some of the story of the carpets after they leave their weavers. Still, it was interesting to learn about this village and about the people and history of Afghanistan from this perspective.
September 11, 2018
Nice writing except for the terrific amount of obscure words.
Depressing subject. Very hard to connect with the people she is writing about. They are so ignorant and superstitious they seem like people living 2000 years ago. Very little to like about them.
Didn't finish, it was not my cup of tea.
Depressing subject. Very hard to connect with the people she is writing about. They are so ignorant and superstitious they seem like people living 2000 years ago. Very little to like about them.
Didn't finish, it was not my cup of tea.
May 8, 2020
I've never experienced such a poetic and vivid reporting. I was very inspired by author, a person so sensitive, delicate and yet so brave and determined to tell about poverty and ugliness she saw. The only reason I didn't give 5 is that some fragments were too poetic and... well, boring. Still, I highly recomend the book.
May 3, 2021
I can't say I loved the writing but it was hard not to fall I love with the story. A poignant yet endearing account of Afganistan. The author did a fantastic job of reporting without casting judgement, letting you, the reader, come to your own conclusion. For me it humanized a country and a people that have been depicted I such a violent light, devoid of all humanity.
September 24, 2022
Interesting story but the language was a bit overblown, as other reviewers have noted. Too many times I stopped reading to look up a word just to find it was misused (grammatically) or not even a word (according to my dictionary. That kind of writing created a barrier for me, the reader, and so, made the book less enjoyable.
June 17, 2017
I was enthralled with this book and the bravery of Anna Badkhen. A peak into an ancient way of living or more accurately survival. The daily life of the members of this Afghan village impresses upon the reader how far removed we are from those living in Afghanistan.
May 20, 2018
I really enjoyed this book though found it quite hard to follow. She seemed to got caught up in fancy words and lost what could of been an amazing glimpse into this exotic beautiful part of the world where I would love to travel to.
November 7, 2017
A fascinating look at life in a remote Afghan village. Beautifully descriptive prose and a very sad tale.
February 23, 2019
the author rarely mentions women - she only describes the dreams of sad, sad men who dream of having fun with foreign girls siging to them
still worth reading
still worth reading
July 27, 2022
Loved reading about the village and Afghanistan in general. Found the author a bit annoying and felt like she used a thesaurus to sound erudite. Overall, glad I read it.
April 23, 2022
Transports the reader across a wind swept landscape into a place where everything is scarce and perseverance and tradition is the mainstay
February 25, 2017
I personally felt that this novel shared an exquisite view of Afghanistan and the parts that we don't see on the news. You grow personal with Afghani Villagers, while still tied to the ever present reality that this is the Afghanistan of today - the Afghanistan of war. The language is melodic and smooth, like a well turned caramel. The novel was a very interesting read and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a quick read with substance and depth.
September 19, 2016
I dipped into this book, and I am not going to finish it, despite its being the October book for my club. I agree with recent negative reviews - that comment about yogurt moon made no sense to me, and Badkhen sprinkles words I did not know throughout, words I did not care to look up. The passages that describe the actual carpet making were minimal. She does not seem to associate with the women. I found the attitude pretentious and the language needlessly precious. I care about Afghanistan, and about carpets too, having travelled to the country, purchased a rug there, and read a great book about Persian carpets (edwards, which I reviewed here). Most every book about Afghanistan has held my interest. This is a strong exception. I wish I could give it zero stars. The gap between the writer's aspirations and accomplishment is huge in this book.
October 12, 2013
Sometimes the consumption of media feels like a task, rather than a pleasant way to pass the time; the pressure to stay current; to outpace spoilers; to participate in the usenet subcommunity discussion du jour. The World is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village is anathema to the exhaustion inherent in modern media—the transience, if not planned obsolescence, of the bestseller and blockbuster. Its cadence is arresting, its pace glacial. It’s barely a book, more a sense of place. Of time, or timelessness; it does not end so much as halt. No world, self-contained between the covers, begins and ends as you pick through the pages. The World is a Carpet is a thread of reality spilling out across its own pages, delicately arranged into prose. It is a tale neither woven nor spun from the ether, an account of what it is to be in Afghanistan when the cameras are off and it’s just a woman and her notebook:
Occasionally, a visitor to Oqa would ask: “Is she building something here?” and Baba Nazar would respond: “No. She only takes notes and tells stories.” And, to preempt potential requests for aid, he would add: “This woman can’t do anything for us.”While actually reading The World is a Carpet, it feels like it will never end. And then it’s over, and you can’t help but wonder what is going on now in Oqa. Because it’s real. And it’s still out there. And you were there, too, if only for four seasons.
He was right. I was of no practical use whatsoever. I was an inadequate raconteur, a collector of other people’s joys and hardships. A mockingbird. A mynah bird. An echo. That I was welcome in the village, month after famished month, was entirely a measure of my hosts’ inexhaustible magnanimity. Ultimately, this was what drew me: that I could show up burdened with deadlines, with the need to fill my notebook and with nothing to offer my hosts in return, and the next thing I knew, I was adopted into the family, mothered, fathered, fed, and loved with the kind of unconditional love that wrapped its tired hands tirelessly around me just because I was there, just because I had come, because in war and sorrow, love was the quintessence of defiance.
March 10, 2015
The title held such promise! Unfortunately, this book did not deliver.
Here are some things I felt the author failed to do:
1) make me care
2) help me understand why she did - that was completely unclear to me
3) what the point of the story was
4) develop my empathy for any of the characters, indeed, I felt the author actually did her characters a disservice. I left the book identifying with the people of the geography less than before.
5) explain carpets in a way that made me feel I knew them better. I felt an opportunity was lost to make the world Afghan carpet snobs, This would have at least delivered something of value to the villagers who hosted her for a year.
6) explain the viewpoints of the Afghans toward their Russian occupiers. Surely they had a viewpoint and since she was Russian, that would have been a good discussion.
7) explain more about the American occupation.
8) make me feel like my time was well-spent. Often I would read five pages of vocabulary new to me (I feel like the author pulled out a pantone color wheel and wrote down every possible color to use in the book), only to reflect and think "ok, what action happened in those five pages - someone loaded a carpet on a bus and drove it to another city." Yawn!
9) why the people didn't leave that God forsaken place.
10) why the women put up with their men living off of their carpet weaving.
11) what putting opium in their children's mouths didn't set off red flags for the villages that "hey! We need to get out of this place. There has to be some place better." That was completely unclear to me why that didn't occur to the villagers.
I will say that the author did make me imagine what our climate-changed future will be like when everything is too dry and there isn't enough water. I looked at all the locations as I read on Google Maps and images. I can see why Afghan landscape has attracted imperialist adventurers for centuries. It looks like it would be a blast to ride a horse there.
This book was badly in need of an editor or a different translator. The grammar was mystifying. This book is skippable.
Here are some things I felt the author failed to do:
1) make me care
2) help me understand why she did - that was completely unclear to me
3) what the point of the story was
4) develop my empathy for any of the characters, indeed, I felt the author actually did her characters a disservice. I left the book identifying with the people of the geography less than before.
5) explain carpets in a way that made me feel I knew them better. I felt an opportunity was lost to make the world Afghan carpet snobs, This would have at least delivered something of value to the villagers who hosted her for a year.
6) explain the viewpoints of the Afghans toward their Russian occupiers. Surely they had a viewpoint and since she was Russian, that would have been a good discussion.
7) explain more about the American occupation.
8) make me feel like my time was well-spent. Often I would read five pages of vocabulary new to me (I feel like the author pulled out a pantone color wheel and wrote down every possible color to use in the book), only to reflect and think "ok, what action happened in those five pages - someone loaded a carpet on a bus and drove it to another city." Yawn!
9) why the people didn't leave that God forsaken place.
10) why the women put up with their men living off of their carpet weaving.
11) what putting opium in their children's mouths didn't set off red flags for the villages that "hey! We need to get out of this place. There has to be some place better." That was completely unclear to me why that didn't occur to the villagers.
I will say that the author did make me imagine what our climate-changed future will be like when everything is too dry and there isn't enough water. I looked at all the locations as I read on Google Maps and images. I can see why Afghan landscape has attracted imperialist adventurers for centuries. It looks like it would be a blast to ride a horse there.
This book was badly in need of an editor or a different translator. The grammar was mystifying. This book is skippable.
May 31, 2016
From an NPR review.
Now granted, I'm in a weird space lately and not able to take deeply serious and depressing topics, but I expected more from this book. Was it put together from separate short stories--there was a lot of repetition regarding descriptions of different people she studies in an incredibly small village in Afganistan. I expected more about carpets, I certainly expected more about women's lives....Perhaps the point was that the people of this village live such a subsistence life that there's not much to talk about? She discusses the possible effects of thousands of years of war on this part of the world. Her writing is beautiful, poetic, with lots of words I had to look up. Did she go through a dictionary to find rarely used words? So overall her impressions of the people of this small town and musings on their history and lives, but nothing of substance that an armchair anthropologist can take away. Anyway, enough crabbing for today.
Now granted, I'm in a weird space lately and not able to take deeply serious and depressing topics, but I expected more from this book. Was it put together from separate short stories--there was a lot of repetition regarding descriptions of different people she studies in an incredibly small village in Afganistan. I expected more about carpets, I certainly expected more about women's lives....Perhaps the point was that the people of this village live such a subsistence life that there's not much to talk about? She discusses the possible effects of thousands of years of war on this part of the world. Her writing is beautiful, poetic, with lots of words I had to look up. Did she go through a dictionary to find rarely used words? So overall her impressions of the people of this small town and musings on their history and lives, but nothing of substance that an armchair anthropologist can take away. Anyway, enough crabbing for today.
August 20, 2013
Anna Badhken catalogs her time in the village of Oqa, a carpet-making, intensely rural & impoverished village in Afghanistan. Having spent several years in Afghanistan, Badhken's knowledge of the country emerges beautifully and rarely between the book's meat: its careful, thorough portraits of the village's inhabitants. Badhken avoids generalizing about Afghanistan, rural life, or poverty while providing devastating scenes from daily life in Oqa. Alongside Badhken, readers celebrate villagers' births and deaths, witness opium addiction and starvation, love and camaraderie. Badhken's clear, complex way of capturing a cluster of people recalls Rory Stewart and Katherine Boo, both of whom have the impressive ability to present their foreign subjects in a manner that is both enormously compassionate and brutally truthful. Absolutely recommend.
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