One of the copies printed for the press.
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Gérard [Pouguet], [words in Persian], Atiq Rahimi, 12.II.08.”
In the Persian tradition, the syngué sabour is a “patience stone” to which one confides one’s sorrows until it shatters — thereby freeing the one who spoke. Rahimi transposes this myth into a room in a country at war: a woman keeps watch over her husband, a fighter reduced to silence, and speaks. The language, written directly in French (a first for an author previously read in translation), is deliberately stripped down, dry and rhythmic, to convey the nakedness of a voice held in silence.
Awarded at Drouant on 10 November 2008, the prize was won on the second ballot (7 votes to 3 for Michel Le Bris). This is also the first Prix Goncourt awarded to P.O.L., a distinctive house within the “Gallimard galaxy,” and recognition of an Afghan writer exiled in France who, through novels and films, questions war, myth and the place of women.