Discoveries

Ice Cream, Helen Dunmore, Grove: 218 pp., $23

No one captures the silence of winter quite like Helen Dunmore. Her writing has the palette of winter, the suffocating, muffled restraint of winter and the glorious detail of a winter landscape. Readers of “Ice Cream,” a collection of short stories about various forms of human vanity, will feel as if they are taking a cure, wrapped in blankets, watching a cook meet the pen pal she has lied to for so long, or the model desperate for a taste of ice cream, or the writer with the overbearing ego. There, the patient reader thinks smugly to himself, but for the grace of literature go I.

*

Earth and Ashes, Atiq Rahimi, Translated from the Dari by Erdag M. Goknar, Harcourt: 96 pp., $19

We sometimes talk about the power of photographs to bring the reality of war back home. Rarely, we think, are words able to etch images in our minds so indelibly. “Earth and Ashes,” a novel written by Atiq Rahimi, a young Afghan who was 17 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan (and now lives in Paris), is as painful and unforgettable as a photograph.

A grandfather, Dastaguir, and his young grandson, Yassin, are on their way across northern Afghanistan to Kabul, where Dastaguir’s son and Yassin’s father, Murad, work in the mines. Theirs is a grisly mission: to inform Murad that their village has been wiped out in the Soviet invasion. Murad’s wife, sister, mother, uncles, aunts, everyone has been killed. Yassin (perhaps 4 or 5) is left deaf by the explosion of the bomb and asks his grandfather why the stones can’t speak anymore when he throws them, and why the Russians have stolen everyone’s voices. Dastaguir, who has not slept for a week, tries to decide whether to tell Murad, whether this news will be like sticking “a dagger in his heart.” He knows that Murad, so like himself, will seek revenge.

Rahimi has written the book in the second person, so that you feel the torment of the grandfather even more acutely. Woven throughout are references to the 11th century Persian epic, “The Book of Kings.” It tells about the creation of the world and features three characters who appear in “Earth and Ashes”: Rostam, who kills in battle the son he did not know about; Sohrab, his son; and Zohak, the tyrant, who rules with serpents that feed off the brains of young men. Who would you most like to be? Would you rather have blood on your hands or on your throat?

*

Tales From the Cuban Empire, Antonio Jose Ponte, Translated from the Spanish by Cola Franzen, City Lights: 90 pp., $11.95

“Tales From the Cuban Empire” is the Cuban “Arabian Nights,” told for our modern times. In this collection of stories, each told with a wild mania, the narrators, like Scheherazade, are desperate to save their lives by telling their story. There is the woman in the airport bathroom who left her country to get away, not from just one man, but all men. She tells her story to the bathroom attendant. There is the apprentice in a butcher’s shop in the Chinese Quarter, whose mentor has taught him how to lead a knife through the spaces in the meat, so as not to dull the blade. “No violence, no raising of eyebrows,” he repeatedly tells his student. There is the inhabitant of the subterranean city, a student of urban planning, who learns the virtues of vertical building in a city whose geographic limits have been reached. “What your blood tells you every night is a mere mirage of the open road. If the land comes to an end, unearth what’s underneath the construction. Excavate, walk on the vertical.” There is the tale told by a prison barber of escapees who swam to the court of Queen Elizabeth II in England. And there is the story of the Congi heads, a tribe of Cubans exiled in Russia whose members name themselves after their national dish, congi, a mixture of black beans and rice. Is the teller saved by the tale? Each story loops back upon itself, arrives at an inconclusive end and should be read once more.