A Thousand Splendid Suns

I have to start to retrofit this sucker with links if I want to be a real blogger. Do I want to be a real blogger? So here’s how I roll the last couple of entries: I read a book, think about all the things I want to write about while I’m reading it, decide that there’s not enough time to be both reader and writer, wake up early when I’m my writing self, sit in the dining room and look out the window while my fingers do whatever it is that they’re doing now. Thanks for caring.

So what is it about Khaled Hosseini that allows him to make me so uncomfortable yet keeps me reading? This is the question I’d like to ask him if I get the chance to see him speak when he visits the old alma mater in October. Because A Thousand Splendid Suns does quite a bit to create discomfort, but the pages turn and turn and other pleasures make way for the pleasure of reading the stories of Laila and Mariam. You don’t need to be Mavis Leno to sympathize with these characters, but having a sense of the plight of Afghani women certainly helps you connect with the book.

Now that, as I think about it, is a very Western sentence: the plight of Afghani women. And I suppose that this leads me to what I like about Hosseini in both A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner: he is a storyteller, not a documentary writer. He has a sense of the universal, and he writes stories about women and men who happen to be Muslims, stories that are read by Westerners not because they fulfill some sort of backward paradigm we’ve created about ugliness, corruption and inequity in fundamentalist Islam, but because they’re good stories.

What I mean, for example, is that when these more or less self-confident women put on the burqa for the first time, they don’t dismiss it as an affront to their sense of self. Despite what happens to them, they keep the suras of their childhoods close at hand to find for them the promise of hope where it would seem that hope is invisible.

Another for example: Zalmai could easily be a mini-Rasheed, a toddler so close to his father that at age four he could be a caution to the never ending cycle of revenge and blood, but Hosseini doesn’t let politics dictate character; instead, he creates a sense of development where Zalmai’s attraction to Tariq seems natural. How easy it would have been to make Zalmai a symbol of violence and chauvinism, infused intractably with his father’s point of view from his crawling days.

And the fact that Laila and Tariq want to return to Kabul, to live in their homeland, their hometown, taps into that intangible connection we all have to the place of our ancestors, and challenges what I believe to be the American assumption that you have to leave places like Kabul to come to places like this if you want the possibility of a better life.

While the English teacher in me can admire metaphors like the tremors Aziza talks about from her, I’ll call it school for those of you (hee hee, look at me pretending someone’s reading) who haven’t read the book yet, this book reminded me of something Roni Sarig said a while back: some stories are just good stories; they don’t have all that English class stuff in them. And that’s how I felt while reading A Thousand Splendid Suns. The little analyst in me wasn’t pulling out this thing and that – I’m not apologizing for the little analyst: I love him and he increases my enjoyment of most books, but it’s nice to see that he has the sense to go on vacation every once in a while. And I wasn’t doing all the reality testing I usually do as a way of giving or withholding my approval to the research or plausibility of the details. All I was doing was reading the story.

Final note about the book itself: thanks for letting the ending unfold, Mr. Hosseini. When all the horror has passed, most authors give us a few pages of where we go from here. By allowing the ending to occur so gradually, you kept some tension in the story (surely something horrible has to happen to Laila now!), which may have made me more invested in Laila’s future happiness.

Aristotle wrote that plot is the most important element of a story, and that character is second. If he had time to read novels, I think he’d appreciate A Thousand Splendid Suns.

What kills me is that I bought it six months ago and kept it on my shelf because this political correctness demon was tugging at my shirt and telling me I should read it so I could empathize with the disenfranchised and lay claim to part of the conversation about literature of other parts of the world in our English department conversations. This turned out to be anything but an obligation.

Next up is The Idiot. I still haven’t gotten around to the poetry thing that was supposed to be my purpose for the summer, but I will, as soon as I clean the basement and set up the space in which I’d imagined myself working. In the meantime, I hold on to the inspiration given me by Alyosha Karamazov, whose will to goodness (there’s my Jesuit education popping up again) helped me, I think, be a better person this past year. I’ve read that Prince Myshkin is a character Dostoevsky conceived of as “pure goodness,” and there is my reason for reading.

My hope is that I will find myself back here before I finish The Idiot, because that might take a while. Ciao.

The calendar tells me it’s summer, so it must be time to set some summer goals. This sounds strangely familiar, but I’d like to blog more. The difference between every other time and now is that now I feel like I have an approach. Whether or not approach is to be followed is another matter; you know how way leads on to way.

So my hope is to get my mind right (hear that as if I’m the warden in Cool Hand Luke) for my new poetry class next fall by reading and writing about poems three or four times a week. I need to spend more time admiring Neruda’s wild juxtapositions, Heather McHugh’s wordplay, and learning to like some of those things I have a difficult time liking from the start. I’ll just treat it like I’m a teenager and poetry is beer. Oh, and I’ll try to find the balance between sounding thoughtful and sounding like a horse’s ass who stresses about what word to put in front of juxtapositions so I don’t sound like I’m impressing myself with juxtapositions..

The book reading/writing thing is bound to be a trade-off. Already I’ve spent a lot of idle mind time on the elliptical thinking brilliant things that I would post about Aleksandar Hemon’s the Lazarus Project, and a proportional amount of time forgetting those thoughts. Here’s the gist of the problem: I can’t stop comparing it all to Everything is Illuminated – the American writer in search of a past; the mysterious and ultimately poignant guide for the journey; the Ukraine. Same, but to a lesser degree, a comparison between the narrator of Absurdistan and this book, with their Eastern European interests in porn and booze, their longing for and letting go of a girl who doesn’t make an appearance in the action of the story itself, and their apparent dislike or disinterest in themselves and their appetites. They fight the same existential battle, one that, perhaps because of my Americanness, is foreign to me.

Anyway, time to get the kids ready for the penultimate day of escuela. Here are the goals for July:

the aforementioned poetry thing
read A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Idiot
meet the neighbors who moved in two months ago

Anyway, about The Lazarus Project, here are a couple of passages I really liked for one reason or another. Maybe I’ll even think about them.

Rora and Vladimir have just arrived in Ukraine, and Rora, as usual, is taking photos of everything. Vladimir says:

Why did you take that picture?
That’s a stupid question, Rora said. I take pictures.
Why do you take pictures?
I take pictures because I like to look at the pictures I take.
It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget about it.
So what.
So nothing, I shrugged.
They can look at the picture and remind themselves.
But what do you see when you look at a picture you took?
I see the picture, Rora said. What’s with these questions?
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
Drink more coffee, Brik, Rora said. It will pick you up.

This speaks to me a little about my own approach to pictures. Maybe I’m too lazy and I forget the camera, so I pretend that I don’t want all the pictures. I used to like to look at photos from my mother’s albums, and because I’m not a facebooker, I don’t really spend much time online looking at digital photos. About the best I do when it comes to enjoying photos is spend some time watching my screensaver when it launches.

But the truth more likely is that I believe pictures make you memory-lazy the way that calculators make you multiplication-lazy and that spell-check makes you spelling-lazy. To me, the useless picture is a useless memory. For example, my wife made a cake with strawberry stripes, blueberry stars and vanilla icing in the shape of a flag for my daughter’s end of third grade party. And two of the parents thought it was such a cool cake that they took pictures of it before it was cut. What will that photo’s life be like? I’ll tell you: lonely. It will exist as a lonely, unappreciated image that will gradually become resented as its takers wonder why they took it, until finally, it is – lightning crashed! – deleted. I’d rather make an effort to remember those things worth remembering.

And here’s another. For context, Rora is a big storyteller, and his stories stretch the bounds of credulity. We’ll watch cartoons, movies, TV shows that do the same thing, and we won’t apply the reality test to them because we’re trying to enjoy them. But the reality test figures prominently in our non-fiction lives. Anyway:

I used to tell stories to Mary, stories of my childhood and immigrant adventures, stories I had picked up from other people. but I had become tired of telling them, tired of listening to them. In Chicago, I had found myself longing for the Sarajevo way of doing it – Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners’ attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. there was a storytelling code of solidarity – you did not sabotage someone else’s narration if it was satisfying to the audience, or you could expect one of your stories to be sabotaged one day, too. Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story, and, maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth – reality is the fastest American commodity.

Later, he tells a story about deceiving his blind uncle with untruths. When he considers that his uncle most likely knew of his fictions, he wishes he had made them grander, that there would have been more delight in the stories had there been fewer boundaries.