Review: "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini
A big improvement for the writer from "The Kite Runner" to this.
But that ain't sayin' much.
Hosseini is not a good writer. He's not a bad one, but there isn't too much that's remarkable in his work. This is coming from someone sympathetic to his material as well. I wanted to like this book. Even now, I don't hate it. But I will say that the skill displayed here in terms of writing is fairly mediocre.
When I was a kid, there was a programme on TV. Some fictitious show about people living in China during the Cultural Revolution. Watching it was kind of like getting kicked in the gonads. It was all human brutality and tragedy and all your religions are dead and no one cares and you are so fucked right now.
I was, like, 9, or something, so I don't know how I'd feel about it now. Maybe it was haphazardly put together and badly acted and overly melodramatic.
What it probably was, I'm guessing, was education dispensed in the form of visual media. Not a work of art; just information in the form of fiction.
Hosseini's works (both this one and "The Kite Runner") are sort of like that show. My criticisms are on the writing itself as an art (forget the fact that I wouldn't know art if it kicked me in the face).
This book kind of reads as if it were a plot-driven movie. There are a few twists and devices that I've come to recognize as Hosseini's signature. A character leaves, is thought to be gone for good, and then returns (it's like when Trinity dies in the Matrix and is brought back to life by Neo--they were just playing with you, also known as "trying too hard to invoke emotion").
In "The Kite Runner," there's one section where Amir is examining the brass ball fixture underneath a table, and then the same style of table shows up, conveniently, elsewhere, and the brass ball becomes the true hero of the story. There's something like that in "A Thousand Splendid Suns" as well.
Maybe Hosseini should write mysteries. Or a CSI episode.
The most interesting part of this book is the part about Kabul's obsession with the movie Titanic (as if James Cameron needed anything else to brag about). Also, one character's estranged father owns a movie theatre, which plays a role in her past. Both of these things reminded me of the scene in "The Kite Runner" when Amir and Hassan think that Charles Bronson is Iranian because his movies are dubbed in Farsi.
Movies seem to be Hosseini's strong point, over war and politics and women's issues. I wouldn't have minded if he had worked that angle somehow. Set the whole thing at the movie theatre. Show us Afghanistan through the movies it watches.
The way in which the country's cultural background and history is brought out to the reader in "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is clumsy and obvious.
"He was fond of sitting her on his lap and telling her stories, like the time he told her that Herat, the city where Mariam was born, in 1959, had once been the cradle of Persian culture, the home of writers, painters, and Sufis."
How convenient, a character who watches the History Channel. With all due respect, I think he could have done a little better than "the cradle of Persian culture." I don't think I've read a write-up on Herat that didn't call it that.
The way Hosseini drops info about Afghanistan's internal politics of the time is no more elegant. There is a lot of name-dropping, all of it done in a "did you know" moment of conversation. They are all names that are recognizable to anyone who has done any simple rudimentary reading on the subject, and there's nothing new attached to those names.
And this isn't a story about them. It's supposed to be a story about ordinary people caught up in the wars and the conflicts. But I think some of the effort spent on trying to connect the main characters to big events could have been better spent in drawing on more personal details. Because there are descriptions of the characters literally starving to death, but it isn't engaging, though it ought to be.
"Okay, okay," you say, "we get it, you fucking art fag. You just have no soul."
Wait up, now, just one more thing before I go.
In one scene, the characters visit the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. This would be equivalent to having fictional characters visit the World Trade Center in some year prior to 2001. Because everyone and their cat knows what happened to those statues.
It's too much. When you do stuff like this, it's as if your characters are just tour guides in a political-historical documentary. This novel lacks a personal edge; there's no sense of intimacy that comes through, even though the writer seems to go through all the right moves. He has the background information, the history, the culture, the politics, the people, but when it's all thrown in together, it doesn't work. Little emerges that I didn't already get from news reports and documented first-hand accounts.
Fiction isn't just about knowing or reporting. It's about spin, like you're the lawyer for a major sports athlete caught behaving badly. But spin it in a way that gives me insight; spin it in a way that makes me see or understand or feel something.
"A Thousand Splendid Suns" is a reporting of events. But it falls short on artistic representation.
But that ain't sayin' much.
Hosseini is not a good writer. He's not a bad one, but there isn't too much that's remarkable in his work. This is coming from someone sympathetic to his material as well. I wanted to like this book. Even now, I don't hate it. But I will say that the skill displayed here in terms of writing is fairly mediocre.
When I was a kid, there was a programme on TV. Some fictitious show about people living in China during the Cultural Revolution. Watching it was kind of like getting kicked in the gonads. It was all human brutality and tragedy and all your religions are dead and no one cares and you are so fucked right now.
I was, like, 9, or something, so I don't know how I'd feel about it now. Maybe it was haphazardly put together and badly acted and overly melodramatic.
What it probably was, I'm guessing, was education dispensed in the form of visual media. Not a work of art; just information in the form of fiction.
Hosseini's works (both this one and "The Kite Runner") are sort of like that show. My criticisms are on the writing itself as an art (forget the fact that I wouldn't know art if it kicked me in the face).
This book kind of reads as if it were a plot-driven movie. There are a few twists and devices that I've come to recognize as Hosseini's signature. A character leaves, is thought to be gone for good, and then returns (it's like when Trinity dies in the Matrix and is brought back to life by Neo--they were just playing with you, also known as "trying too hard to invoke emotion").
In "The Kite Runner," there's one section where Amir is examining the brass ball fixture underneath a table, and then the same style of table shows up, conveniently, elsewhere, and the brass ball becomes the true hero of the story. There's something like that in "A Thousand Splendid Suns" as well.
Maybe Hosseini should write mysteries. Or a CSI episode.
The most interesting part of this book is the part about Kabul's obsession with the movie Titanic (as if James Cameron needed anything else to brag about). Also, one character's estranged father owns a movie theatre, which plays a role in her past. Both of these things reminded me of the scene in "The Kite Runner" when Amir and Hassan think that Charles Bronson is Iranian because his movies are dubbed in Farsi.
Movies seem to be Hosseini's strong point, over war and politics and women's issues. I wouldn't have minded if he had worked that angle somehow. Set the whole thing at the movie theatre. Show us Afghanistan through the movies it watches.
The way in which the country's cultural background and history is brought out to the reader in "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is clumsy and obvious.
"He was fond of sitting her on his lap and telling her stories, like the time he told her that Herat, the city where Mariam was born, in 1959, had once been the cradle of Persian culture, the home of writers, painters, and Sufis."
How convenient, a character who watches the History Channel. With all due respect, I think he could have done a little better than "the cradle of Persian culture." I don't think I've read a write-up on Herat that didn't call it that.
The way Hosseini drops info about Afghanistan's internal politics of the time is no more elegant. There is a lot of name-dropping, all of it done in a "did you know" moment of conversation. They are all names that are recognizable to anyone who has done any simple rudimentary reading on the subject, and there's nothing new attached to those names.
And this isn't a story about them. It's supposed to be a story about ordinary people caught up in the wars and the conflicts. But I think some of the effort spent on trying to connect the main characters to big events could have been better spent in drawing on more personal details. Because there are descriptions of the characters literally starving to death, but it isn't engaging, though it ought to be.
"Okay, okay," you say, "we get it, you fucking art fag. You just have no soul."
Wait up, now, just one more thing before I go.
In one scene, the characters visit the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. This would be equivalent to having fictional characters visit the World Trade Center in some year prior to 2001. Because everyone and their cat knows what happened to those statues.
It's too much. When you do stuff like this, it's as if your characters are just tour guides in a political-historical documentary. This novel lacks a personal edge; there's no sense of intimacy that comes through, even though the writer seems to go through all the right moves. He has the background information, the history, the culture, the politics, the people, but when it's all thrown in together, it doesn't work. Little emerges that I didn't already get from news reports and documented first-hand accounts.
Fiction isn't just about knowing or reporting. It's about spin, like you're the lawyer for a major sports athlete caught behaving badly. But spin it in a way that gives me insight; spin it in a way that makes me see or understand or feel something.
"A Thousand Splendid Suns" is a reporting of events. But it falls short on artistic representation.