A Curse on Dostoevsky by Atiq Rahimi, review Violence in Afghanistan has provided material for dark fables (Jamil Ahmad), gory epics (Nadeem Aslam) and sentimental blockbusters (Khaled Hosseini). In this slim puzzle of a novel the French-Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi takes a more unusual approach, recasting Crime and Punishment in Kabul during the civil war that followed Soviet withdrawal and preceded the rise of the Taliban. The novel begins just after its tormented hero, Rassoul, has murdered an old woman with an axe (she'd put his fiancée, Sophia, to work in a brothel). He's well aware of his uncanny resemblance to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, and like him can't help but return to the crime scene, despite fears that he might have been seen. Mysteriously, though, there's no sign of any disturbance, let alone a body; the victim's daughter casually asks if he knows where she's got to. The frantic opening leaves you dazed. Rassoul can't afford to eat yet spends much of his time stoned, which fuels his (and our) uncertainty about what exactly happened. It's odd that it doesn't much trouble Rassoul's fiancée or anyone else when he suddenly loses his voice - a condition that lasts most of the book - but this comes to feel like part of the point of a novel in which the chaos of another rocket attack is never far away. When Rassoul turns himself in, his confession barely raises an eyebrow, which gives him cause to reframe the murder - if it was a murder - as a perverse protest at the cheapness of Afghan life. This, at least, is how things look in what Rassoul calls the "poetic abyss" of his "distorted ideas," where it's hard to get your bearings. We're led to believe that the novel's relationship to Crime and Punishment exists only in his head, which makes sense in terms of its events, but less so in view of how many other characters have counterparts in Dostoevsky, as if Rassoul has wound up in a parallel universe. And while the points of reference are high-literary - one Youssef K appears late on - the rug-pulling gestures may be familiar to anyone who stuck with Dallas. Probably too many balloons are burst by the time a prison clerk starts to write the novel we've just read, but despite the sprint start this is more a novel to chew over than gobble down.