The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

This week I finished The Kite Runner, the latest book our reading group has tackled. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. I have only heard a few things about the movie’s plot, but apart from that I knew was that the book was set in Afghanistan and that the Taliban were in it. So, I was expecting pain and tragedy. I wasn’t far off.

There are some characters that I’ve come across that just seem like lightning rods for tragedy. The boys in this book are a lot like that, especially Hassan. That poor guy never gets a break. The story is told from the perspective of Amir, who turns out to be Hassan’s half-brother later in the book. Amir is hard to like at first. He treats Hassan like a tag-a-long friend, someone to play with when there isn’t anyone else around and who he can boss around. I didn’t start liking Amir until he and his father escape and head for America.

The part I liked the best was the last third or so, of the book, after Amir grows up into a gentle man. He gets a chance to redeem himself and atone for the huge wrong he did to Hassan, when he didn’t tell anyone about what happened to Hassan in the alley. He gets to rescue Hassan’s son, Sohrab. And though he kind of botches it, he still gets to rescue Sohrab and take him far away from Afghanistan.

I will give this bit of advice to anyone who wants to read this book. Don’t go in expecting to understand the fall of the king in 1975 or the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s. This book is about Amir and his family. It’s about good men who try to survive in very difficult circumstances. There are no attempts to understand the motives of the Taliban, although there are some references to how they managed to take power in the first place. In this book, it’s not because of their adherence to a very strict version of Shari’a, it’s because they made the Russians surrender at at last. All of the Talib’s are portrayed as violent, possibily sociopathic, hypocrites. So, read this as a book about redemption and atonement, not as anything political.

Possession, Part II

I am about mid-way through Possession now and am still holding on–though I’ll admit that I’ve started to skip over the excepted pieces of poetry and critical essays. The story part is still very interesting. It’s not a very exciting read, I’ll admit, but it’s a very different kind of love story.

One of the things I’m enjoying the most about this book is that it is also a critique of modern literary scholarship. Last time I mentioned the absurdity of what scholars write about and read into their subjects. This time I want to comment on something that one of the characters said. The character, Fergus Wolff–a scumbucket with a better vocabulary–wondered angrily about the point of what they do. He reads “dead letters by dead people” (my paraphrase). Truth to tell, the vast majority of people couldn’t care less about literary scholarship. So why do literary scholars write? Sure some write to stay in academia (for whatever reason), but there has to be a deeper reason to stay in a profession that is poorly paid and highly competitive.

I think it’s because literary criticism is, in part, a search for meaning and, maybe, truth. When I was an undergraduate working on a literature degree, I started to think of novels and plays and poems as petri dishes, where the author would throw characters and setting and situations together just to see what would happen. (I always thought this was especially true of Shakespeare.) I saw literature as a safe way to do human behavioral experimentation and the psychology of the text was what interested me the most.

My favorite works to write about were any of the variations of the Faust myth: Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Shelley’s Frankenstein, etc. What drew me to those works was the moral and ethical dilemmas that the characters wrestled with. Maybe it’s because I am a dropout from Christianity and have had to find my own moral compass, but watching those characters and thinking deeply about their motivations had profound meaning for me.

I don’t know if it’s true for every scholar, that they find a story that speaks to them and that they can listen to and think about for years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most literary critics continually return to the same author or the same work over and over again.

Possession: A Romance, by A.S. Byatt, Part I

I’m sure you’ve all heard the saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” right? Well, I’ll be the first to admit that I do judge books by their covers. Bright colors, interesting fonts and pictures in a bookstore will catch my eye. That being said, when you’re reading a book called Possession: A Romance, people will get the wrong idea. Since I picked up Possession, I’ve been answering a lot of questions with, “Yes, it is a love story, but with English literature scholars.”

So far, I’m having a good time. It took me a couple of chapters to adjust to Byatt’s wandering prose, but I’m definitely hooked now.

Because I was a literature major in school, I am really enjoying the descriptions of the study of literature in this novel. Because this novel takes place in the 1980s, the literary scholarship going on is highly Postmodernist. I don’t know if Byatt meant to write it this way, but a lot of the article titles and conference topics discussed are starting to sound satirical. When a list of deconstructive/Postmodernist articles titles is listed, it’s hard not to see them as slightly absurd. Do you remember the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin writes a paper on Dick and Jane? A lot of these titles are like that.

Plus, the way that scholarship is conducted in this novel brings up a question that really started to bother me in my last years as an undergrad. Often, when writing a paper, I would wonder how much of what I was saying about an author’s intentions was really accurate and how much was just my reading of the text. A great example of what I mean comes from Possession itself. A lot of the feminist scholars in this novel are concerned with, to paraphrase, exposing the hidden rage in Victorian women’s writing. As one of the characters comments, they would try to find it in even the dullest and most domestic diaries.

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

I didn’t think that I would like this book all that much when I first picked it up. Literary fiction and I haven’t always gotten along in the past. But then, I kind of thought that about The Shadow of the Wind when I first read that one, but I loved that book and I keep recommending it to people.

Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, though, was so engaging that I ended up reading it in two days. The Thirteenth Tale is, I think, unique in fiction today because you don’t really get out-and-out Gothic fiction any more. And by Gothic fiction, I mean those depraved stories that you got around the same time that Romanticism was taking off. (I always kind of wondered about why those two literary movements coincided when I was a young lit major. How could a country produce someone like William Wordsworth at roughly the same time that it produces people like Matthew Lewis? Weird) Anyway, this book is about as bizzare as those first Gothic novels and the plots are about as disturbing, too.

One of the reasons I first picked this book up was because the New York Times book reviews said it was similar to The Shadow of the Wind, and about books with a mystery on top. But it’s not really about books so much as it is about storytelling, truth and lies. I hate to say much more about this book because when I try to think of a way to describe the plot I can only come up with sentences that involve truth being stranger than fiction and the ability of some people to reinvent themselves. And that sound a little dull, but I have to let you know that this book is damned interesting. It’s not an especially moving book, and it may not even be particularly believable when you pick apart the plot, but this book is fascinating.

The Joy Luck Club, Part II

Though I really enjoy reading The Joy Luck Club, I always come out of it feeling somewhat disappointed. The whole book is about mothers and daughers understanding each other and reconciling and learning about each other. Ying-ying teaches her daughter Lena to be a tiger instead of just taking what other people give her. Lindo and Waverly learn that no every comment is meant to wound. An-mei tries to teach her daughter Rose to fight for things instead of just letting them go.

But the fourth mother-daughter pairing, Suyuan and Jing-mei, you never get a reconciliation because Tan used Suyuan’s death as a catalyst for the plot. While Jing-mei learns to understand what motivated her mother, we never get that moment of reconciliation. It’s just too late for them. Because of this, the book feels unbalanced and a little incomplete to me.

Still, this is a really well written book. If you cry during stories about families, this one will make you cry.

***

I noticed this when I was reading The Book Standard this morning. Ann Coulter must be stopped!

The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, Part I

I know that I said I was going to read A Long, Long Way, but it just didn’t grab me. I made it all they way through the first chapter and went, “Eh.” But the idea of that book sound interesting enough that I might go back it sometime.

So, now I’m reading The Joy Luck Club, one my favorites that I haven’t read in a long time. What I’ve always liked about Amy Tan is way that she can make Chinese and Chinese-American culture come to life. She can recreate the naunces of the language and the everyday philosophy of China. It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anyone that can analyze their own culture in such a way that things get explained without a lot of expository prose that bogs the story down.

Whenever I encounter a book where the characters are from a completely different culture from me–every Amy Tan book I’ve read, John Burdett’s books about Detective Sonchay Jitpleecheep, or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart–I find myself reexamining my position on cultural relativism. In the main, I think that all cultures (with a few exceptions) are equally good. If they work, they’re good; if they don’t, they need to get replaced with something that works. But some of the ideas in Chinese culture that get portrayed here (like daughters-in-law being servants to their inlaws, teaching girls to “swallow sorrow,” etc.) disturb me. But on the otherhand, listening to pop psychology and such makes me think that everyone needs to learn to swallow a little sorrow and stop whinging about their lives and go and change the things they don’t like.

I always come back to the same position, though. Any culture that isn’t your own is going to seem weird. You often don’t understand how people in other cultures think. And people in other cultures probably think the same thing about us. With some exceptions, I think that all cultures and cultural practices are equally valid ways to live.

But I do like books that make me reexamine my ideas about things. I think it keeps them fresh. And it keeps my on my toes, so that if cultural relativism comes up in conversations (and I work in academia, so this sort of thing happens to me more than most), I can succintly argue my position.