A review by sharkybookshelf
The Blind Man's Garden by Nadeem Aslam

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense

4.0

Accompanied by his foster brother Mikal, Jeo sneaks into Afghanistan during the US invasion to provide medical assistance to civilians, but their good intentions don’t protect them from getting caught up in politics and war.

This is one of those books where I don’t think that my review can ever quite do it justice. You may well be wondering why I only gave it four stars, and it’s simply that the writing was beautiful but at times a little too lyrical for me,occasionally leaving me a little confused. There are a lot of elements, yet they cleverly come together into a nuanced story of the repercussions of the US’s invasion of Afghanistan in one of the peripheral players, Pakistan, something that seems rarely considered in the West. Aslam is deeply critical of the US’s atrocious treatment (torture) of anybody deemed a potential jihadi - this portion of the story was very well told - but he is also deeply critical of those in Pakistan taking advantage of events to push an extremist agenda and interpretation of Islam, showing how they are ultimately interlinked and play into each other. Through the lives of one family, the story touches on education, personal relationships with faith, women in Pakistani society, Pakistani politics and the factions within the military, and wrapped up in this story of war and its consequences are also stories of love and the wonder of nature. A beautifully-written, complex, heart-breaking story of living with past choices, survival, the far-reaching consequences of the US invasion of Afghanistan and so much more.