True love is a voyage. And true voyages are like love. With this short narrative, Ingrid Thobois invites us to an encounter between the two. The end of one and the discovery of the other. Placing our footsteps, cautiously, in the narrator’s words, we visit Afghanistan, from Kabul to Djallabab. An intimate Afghanistan, marked by the war, of course, but totally unlike the images seen on the evening news. The young woman gets there shortly after the American intervention, to teach French. She falls in love with another expatriate, much older, and married. While for her, their liaison is unique, her torments are like those of every passion: erotic escapades, longing for the other, desire for the absolute, hope of living together someday, extravagant promises, disillusion and suffering. When the narrator finally succumbs to the charms of her host country, she is delivered from those of the man who caused her to suffer a thousand deaths. Her encounter with the Prince alone isn’t enough to make her forget her lover, but Afghanistan transports and galvanizes her. Disoriented to her very soul, she is open to meeting beings whose smiles, words and gestures become engraved in her memory; her restrained language engraves them in ours.
Written by a young woman of 25, this sensitive, restrained first novel is the tale of a dual passion: for a country and a man. It is permeated with the thousands of colors and odors of Afghanistan, a violent and bewitching land in which love can bloom intensely.