In the last few months, every time I’ve asked friends what they’re reading in their book groups, they always mention The Kite Runner. Even my own book group, notorious for not reading books at all, has chosen this book to discuss.
First-time novelist Khaled Hosseini has written a book about two motherless boys growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1970s, and what happens to them over the next 30 years. Amir, the narrator, is the son of a wealthy businessman. Hassan, his closest friend, is the son of his father’s servant. Amir is a Sunni Muslim, and Hassan a Shi’a. In the wake of a horrifying incident, their lives diverge, but they’re fated to be connected again decades later.
The setting of the book is central to its story. Amir and Hassan are boys in the last days of the Afghan monarchy. Soon the country is torn by war, and Amir and his father immigrate to the United States. Later in the book, Amir returns to an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban. The author’s angst over the destruction of his beloved country is palpable on every page.
The Kite Runner is a good book, but I don’t think it’s a great book. It has narrative tension, scenes that are so graphic that they’re difficult to read, conflict that hurts the heart, and a decent story. But ultimately it’s a little too contrived. I kept finding myself thinking, “OK, when is the bad guy going to show up again?” And sure enough, he did, right on cue. But to Hosseini’s credit, he resists the temptation to write an overly happy, Hollywood ending. And that’s important, given that The Kite Runner is sure to be made into a movie.
A FEW MONTHS AGO, my interest was piqued in another first novel, Florida, by author Christine Schutt. Florida was one of five books to receive a nomination for The National Book Award for fiction in 2004. All of the books nominated in this category were written by relatively unknown women authors, a fact that was not pleasing to some more established, and — big surprise — male authors who did not get nominated.
So, having read about the controversy, I approached this book with my hackles raised, ready to defend it. But, alas, that’s hard to do. Florida feels like a fractured, extended creative writing exercise. I admire spare writing, but this book takes that concept to unacceptable lengths. Schutt’s only other book is a collection of short stories, Nightwork, and though I haven’t read it, I suspect she’s more comfortable in that format.
Florida is the story of Alice Fivey, whose father is dead and whose mother is admitted to a psychiatric sanitarium when Alice is 10. Shuttled between a rich grandmother and a childless aunt and uncle, she grows up relying on her own inner resources. She ultimately creates a life for herself, shaped by but independent of her past.
A BETTER BOOK is Israeli author Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. Considered by many to be Israel’s most beloved novelist, Oz has tackled his own past for the first time in this extraordinary book. In over 500 pages, shifting back and forth in time, he
tells the story of his family. Growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and 1950s, Oz (born Amos Klausner) was the cherished only child of parents who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s.
Though I had the rough outline of those times and events in my head, I found myself ignorant of much of the detail, so this book proved a wonderful history lesson. I learned about the occupation by the British, the United Nations’ vote to partition Palestine, the birth of the Jewish state of Israel, the siege of Jerusalem — all through the eyes of a young boy who lived through these historic events.
While the collective history in A Tale of Love and Darkness provides a wonderful backdrop, it’s Oz’s personal story — and tragedy — that are central to this memoir. His beautiful mother’s suicide when he was 12 informs everything that went before and after. The fact that it took him 50 years to put it on paper speaks to his difficulty in dealing with this saddest of all stories.
Oz’s father remarried not long after his mother’s death, and, at 14, Oz decided to leave home, join a kibbutz and change his name. He writes, “What the truth is I do not know, because I hardly ever spoke to my father about the truth. He hardly ever talked to me about his childhood, his loves, love in general, his parents, his brother’s death, his own illness, his suffering, or suffering in general. We never even talked about my mother’s death. Not a word. I did not make it easy for him either, and I never wanted to start a conversation that might lead to who knew what revelations. If I started to write down here all the things we did not talk about, my father and I, I could fill two books. My father left me a great deal of work to do, and I’m still working.”
The work of telling this most personal of stories is obviously cathartic for Oz. Near the end of A Tale of Love and Darkness, he writes, “I have hardly ever spoken about my mother till now, till I came to write these pages. Not with my father, or my wife, or my children or with anybody else. After my father died, I hardly spoke about him either. As if I were a foundling.”
Oz’s writing can be lyrical, as when he describes the elusive nature of memory: “Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon were reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones.”
FINALLY, if you’re a lover of short stories, be sure to read Canadian author Alice Munro’s latest collection, Runaway. The book is comprised of eight stories, each with a one-word title: “Chance,” “Silence,” “Passion,” “Trespasses,” to name a few. If you subscribe to The New Yorker magazine, as I do, you’ll recognize the first five of these stories. But I found myself contentedly reading them again, able to savor them even more the second time around.
Munro’s stories are almost always about women — young, old, happy and not. Munro is a believer in the ability of a single moment to turn a life, and her fiction reads that way, too. Sometimes, as in the story “Soon,” she is able to summarize what’s going on in one clear, profound sentence: “Because it’s what happens at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can.”
Breck Longstreth is an Island resident and can be reached at breckonbooks@yahoo.com
