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THE CHRISTIAN
KAMIKAZE
Novel
by Angelo Tondini Quarenghi
Quarenghi
What if the West were to give up turning the other cheek and go back to the biblical rule
of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”?
What would happen if a Christian decided to blow himself up in a mosque?
The story
Paolo Vida, a sixty-year-old photographer, has a plan to make up for his life, as anonymous as it is full of mistakes.
He leaves for Kabul on a military plane and there he organizes a suicide attack that will make him famous all over the
world. It will be the answer to the attack on the Twin Towers and the human-bombs that make the West tremble.
So with meticulous precision he prepares his personal vendetta against Islamic fanaticism.
“The Christian Kamikaze” is a great tapestry of the Afghan capital in the first years after the end of the war,
just after the Taliban regime was overturned. Encounters and clashes, passion and desperation, remorse, memories
and discovery alternate in the framework of a city reduced to rubble and yet extraordinarily alluring.
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In Kabul Vida meets other journalists, other war reporters. Confrontations and lively discussions spring up about
the role of the
United States in the world, about Christianity, Islam, terrorism and the decline of western society.
The female protagonist is Kokla, a charming Afghan girl who lives in Switzerland but has come back to Kabul after
an absence of many years. She will be the voice of Islam in the close discussions with Paolo and the central character
of many of the pages in the book.
The novel follows Vida’s development day by day, from his total aversion towards the Muslim world to his critical
reflections on western society and a surprising conclusion.
“The Christian Kamikaze” is the diary of a restless soul seeking an answer to failure and to the absurdity of life
in his last instant of it, in his extreme sacrifice. It is a dramatic story, but there is also an unusually ironic
vein to this man destroyed by technology and modernity.
It’s a gripping tale, a serial about the clash of two cultures. A novel about Kabul.
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