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.