A Door in the Earth

Amy Waldman demonstrates the complexities of family, education, culture, religious traditionalism, and the role of media and the military in shaping perception in this captivating new novel centered on a remote village in Afghanistan. Parveen Shamsa is a recent college graduate of anthropology in Northern California, where she has lived as an Afghan émigré since age two. Now, in 2009, at age 21, she is passionately inspired by a memoir, Mother Afghanistan, written by an American ophthalmologist and activist, Gideon Crane.

Parveen decides to be the first American since Crane to go to this quiet village and stay with the same host family. Initially, Crane went to Afghanistan after he was busted as a crook, in exchange for his fraud schemes against the American government, and to redeem his adulterous past. Parveen is going as an idealist and to put her medical anthropology studies to good use.

Through a charitable foundation that Crane initiated after his return to America, he built a maternity clinic in this village many miles away from Kabul, where he stayed with Waheed, Fereshta, and their six children--Fereshta was pregnant with their seventh. It was his grief over her death in childbirth that inspired his shiny, technologically advanced new clinic and the memoir of his experience there in the farm village. And currently, Crane’s activism has spread to influence the American military in elevating Afghanistan’s infrastructure, such as paving roads to allow outside access.

Waheed is now married to Fereshta’s younger sister, and has had three more children. Moreover, he has taken on yet another young wife to help with the daily labor. Almost everyone in the village is illiterate, sharing the backbreaking farm work. The village’s religious leader, a shrewd businessman who keeps the inhabitants in check, does nothing to dispel their ignorance about medicine and infection control, or to assist in bringing education and modernity to village life. The village birth assistant, an ancient and suspicious woman, is content to keep the families in the Dark Ages and to resist innovation.

But why does the female doctor only travel once a week to the clinic, for an afternoon only, and why is the technology sitting mostly idle? Although Crane spent money to staff the clinic, it sits there empty most of the time. Why does it seem that, even after all the donated monies, the women who are pregnant are no better off than before? These and other questions emerge as Parveen integrates into village life and attends all the appointments at the clinic. She sets up daily readings of the book chapters of Mother Afghanistan to any interested villagers, to demonstrate and uplift them with how “famous” their village is to Americans, and to help open their minds.

Mother Afghanistan stood as an enigmatic unknown to these backward, hardworking, and earnest inhabitants, despite its reach in America. But once they started hearing the contents of the memoir from Parveen’s daily readings, the question of its truth, exaggeration, or outright fiction begins to unfold. The book was like the ziggurat of American intervention in Afghanistan, but is it truth or fable? Is paving over the roads equal to paving over the truth?

Waldman also does a superb job of highlighting the paradox of deception between the military and Afghanistan. What is noble in ideology and workable in practice may require a sleight of hand. Parveen’s virtuous ideals could be both honorable and dangerous. It is a coming of age for her, to see shades of grey-- where black and white can be reductive and untenable between truth and lies—and can make all the difference between life and death.

In graceful and measured prose, Waldman, in my estimation, exceeds even her last book, THE SUBMISSION, in moving me to the edge of the abyss and persuading me to realize that, from the comfort of the U.S., with our modern homes, big-screen TVs, and comfortable lifestyles, we may still be somewhere on the continuum between arrogance and ignorance. When a developed country like ours tries to help, it can scorch the earth even in the most undeveloped places of need.

“…anthropology, while purportedly allowing us to understand other cultures, was really a tool to understand our own.”

Thank you to @LittleBrown for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Writing: 4.5/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 5/5

A beautifully written novel that captures the heart and complexity of life in rural Afghanistan. 21-year old Parveen is an Afghani American whose parents escaped the country in 1998. Inspired by the best-selling memoir “Mother Afghanistan” by Dr. Gideon Crane, Parveen decides she wants to “help.” She arranges through Crane’s Foundation to visit the village featured in the book and in which a state of the art clinic for women’s health has been built. An anthropology student, Parveen plans to investigate the “structural reasons and power dynamics” that explain why so many Afghani women are dying. However, once established in the village, she is repeatedly surprised by how very different reality is from that described in the book.

The narrative is equal parts external description — the stunning landscape, the people, the events — and internal evolution as she learns more about her privileged status as an American and how very abstract her interests are compared to the reality of what is needed.

Well-developed characters represent a variety of factions and opinions — Berkeley Anthropology Professor Bannerjee, with whom Parveen corresponds, maintains a liberal, but abstract and condescending view of the Afghani people; Lt Col Trotter, representing the US military, believes in the military goals to help the Afghan people and yet faces ever increasing resistance from the locals; Afghani Aziz interprets for the US military, desperate to keep his job and simultaneously keep things from blowing up. All treat the truth as something to be manipulated — Trotter explains that “war was about controlling the story as much as the territory”; Aziz does not interpret exactly but manipulates statements to be more acceptable to the other; Banerjee thinks nothing of betraying Parveen for the “greater good”; and Crane invented half of his “memoir” in order to sell books and inspire donations.

The writing is beautiful and well put together. The memoir style allows multiple layers to be exposed simultaneously — observations of the village and its inhabitants are simultaneously overlaid with anthropological commentary and Parveen’s exposition on her own growing awareness. I particularly appreciated the insightful and multi-faceted commentary about Americans on the global stage — motivations, approaches, and the sad contrast between laudable aims and failing implementations.

Overall, while I did not find this book uplifting or inspiring I did find it deeply educating. Highly recommended.

Good quotes:
“It bothers you Americans that the world is the way it is, doesn’t it?”

“The first time he’d met Dr. Gideon, he said, he also had to give his story. Americans collected and offered them like they were business cards.”

“In moments of clarity she understood that the village was a backdrop against which Americans played out their fantasies of benevolence or self-transformation or, more recently, control. She was as guilty of this as Trotter or Crane. She’d come to play at being an anthropologist, and play was all it had been, because at some point, without much thought, she’d set all her anthropological work aside.”

“The urge to intervene, a high of its own, was a hard habit to break. Salvation could become an addiction, too.”

“Fiction disguised as nonfiction in the service of justice had a long and noble history. Abolitionists had invented or amplified escape slave narratives to dramatize their cause…”

And yet she read on, recognizing that the muscle of moral superiority can be a pleasurable one to exercise. Perhaps Crane, in making this warty presentation of himself, understood that too.”

“It was her first awareness that perhaps there is no self, no core, unshaped by others. From the moment we’re conscious that we’re being viewed, we’re being molded.”

“ ‘What I am here to learn is why so many women in Afghanistan are dying. Without understanding the structural reasons, without tackling the power dynamics that prevent women from having a voice, let alone proper health care, nothing will change.’ She was feeling proud of this declamation and the doctor nodded, as if she were agreeing, then said, ‘At the end of a labor, Parveen, a woman lives, or she dies. That is all that concerns me.’ ”

“To be female here was to grasp at scraps of information and sew them into the shape you imagined reality to be. Into fictions, patterned on distortions and inventions. The women needed an accurate understanding of the peril in which they lived — and the reasons for it.”

“She had, within sight, something fundamental, and also painful. which was that to be an adult was to have to make decisions and take actions that might be wrong. That might cause harm. To live was to bruise, the doctor seemed to be saying: there was no other way. Unlike Professor Banerjee or Gideon Crane, Dr. Yasmeen projected no certainty about the right path to take, the one that would avoid error and hurt; indeed, she seemed skeptical there was such a path. She didn’t think that all the answers could be had, much less claim to have them herself.”

“The digitized faces, fingerprints, and irises of men who’d never left these mountains would live perpetually in a DC suburb. Eternal life of another kind.”

A Door in the Earth may very well be the book that Amy Waldman was born to write. Only someone who is intimately aware of the nuances of Afghanistan and its misunderstood societal landscape and complicated truths could ever have put together a book like this.

Ironically, the impetus for this book is—a book. Parveen Shamsa, an American of Afghan descent, is galvanized to action after reading a bestseller from humanitarian activist Gideon Crane called Mother Afghanistan. Surely the author had Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace in mind. Like that book—filled with chicanery and fabrications—Mother Afghanistan is an inspirational memoir about a young mother who died needlessly in childbirth in a poverty-stricken rural village. Although the book results in the building of a hospital, it also serves as a monument to the author and his ego.

It takes the misdirected and idealistic college graduate Parveen time to recognize what the reader is able to instinctively parse. The gleaming hospital lacks appropriate personnel and a second generator and is, in effect, a modern building and not a care center. But it does capture America’s imagination and before too long, the U.S. Army shows up and wants to pave a road. Problem is, in an area where no one has cars and where a road could lead to envy from nearby villages, a road is not what’s needed. What the village really needs is he with their aging irrigation systems, or a school bu8iding for their children, who are educated in the mosque.

This novel tackles many subjects: the subjugation of women and its tragic consequences, the fantasies of American goodwill, the invention of fairytale-like stories and symbols to justify continual American intervention, the necessity for lies in a place where truth can sometimes lead to death. We, the readers, see life in Afghanistan from varying perspectives that include the village commander and khan, the dai (midwife), the host family, the solitary OB/GYN who can only visit weekly, the U.S. military and of course, Parveen herself.

From time to time, I sensed a bit of authorial intrusion—the feeling that the author had stepped in to drum home a point. Normally this would cause me to distract a star but in this case, the book is just so incredibly good and so important that to me, it is a definite 5-star. I closed the last page feeling far more informed about the intricate challenges that lie ahead for this misunderstood part of the world.

A Door in the Earth was a very good read. Since the US has recently withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, the subject matter resonated with our book club. Our presence in a country we truly know little about, may have done more harm than good. It puts a microscope on the tragedy of war and even the efforts of some you think they can change a culture for the “better”.

A gripping story of very real people and the effects of their sometimes misguided altruism which speaks to situations in real life--Greg Mortenson in Afghanistan, Renee Bach in Uganda, Sam Chillders, the so called Machine Gun Preacher in South Sudan, and probably others we haven't heard of. These real-life people as well as Dr. Crane and to some extent, Parveen, were inspired to do good and took action. The problem that the book illustrates so well is that wanting to do good is not enough; one must also possess the skills needed.

While Parveen's "white privilege" was certainly annoying, it was very realistic. Having spent time as a civilian in Afghanistan, I found all of the book's characters and situations very true to life.

The importance of this book is to open our eyes to how acts originating out of altruism can turn deadly when they are coupled with naivety, an unwillingness to be open to other realities and points of view, a blind following of accepted but inaccurate "truths", and a flawed understanding of the dynamics of other societies.

If you are interested in reading about village life in Afghanistan in a compelling novel, this book is for you.

I found this novel way too derivative. The story focuses on a supposed do-gooder in Afghanistan. While the charity is different, this time health clinics for women, the story reads too much like Three Cups of Tea.

I found this novel way too derivative. The story focuses on a supposed do-gooder in Afghanistan. While the charity is different, this time health clinics for women, the story reads too much like Three Cups of Tea.

Excellent.

A couple of the other reviewers wrote very good, detailed reviews of this book. I just want to encourage people to read it. The author shows the complexity of the young woman's struggle to understand what is going on in the village, how she, and Colonel Trotter, and the American public were duped by the lies in Dr. Crane's memoir, and how easy it is for people to totally misunderstand each other especially when there are cultural and language barriers. I hope many people read this book.

If you loved her first book, you are obligated to buy this one. It’s the law.