The Middle East: Novels

When the war in Afghanistan started, I was desperate to learn more about that part of the world, but my local bookstore (Powell's City of Books - I'm fortunate enough to live in Portland, Oregon) was almost completely sold out of their Middle East section.

Finally, two novels set in Afghanistan appeared. First came Yasmina Khadra's The Swallows of Kabul, a slender book that I read quickly, but which lingered longer than many in my memory. Then came Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, a less spare book written in a more popular style that has also stayed with me.

Both books are about life under the Taliban, both are about guilt. The protagonist in Swallows is a jailer who becomes fascinated with an attractive woman prisoner soon to be executed. Anything he might do to help her would put his own life in peril. While fascinated and horrified by the story, I found it difficult to identify with the jailer. If anything, this austere novel increased my sense of Afghanistan as an alien country with whose people I had little in common.

In contrast, I identified immediately with Kite Runner's protagonist. The kite-flying contest and its rules may have been quite different from any of my own childhood games, but I could feel the boy's yearning to win a kite as though it were my own experience. When he cheated his friend, I could feel his shame and guilt, too. This novel brought Afghanistan and its people close.

It's been awhile since I read these novels, so the details have faded, but the feelings they aroused are still with me.

I have not read The Swallows of Kabul, but I did enjoy The Kite Runner very much. It is interesting to look at the various, and varying, definitions of what countries comprise the "Middle East" as opposed to the Near East and Far East. See www.wikipedia.com for an interesting article on this.

For those interested in the historical side of things, I can recommend two books: The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, by Peter Hopkirk, and Signal Catastrophe: The Retreat from Kabul 1842, by Patrick Macrory. Anyone who thinks the Afgans can be easily, or even eventually, pacified, should read the latter in particular. The Soviets learned the same tough lesson in the 20th century that the Brits did in the 19th.

Good suggestion, John. In the general theme of comparisons, comparing present events (with their causes and consequences) with past can be very enlightening - though also replete with questions and mysteries.

For those interested, I'll touchstone the recommended books: The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk and Signal Catastrophe: The Retreat from Kabul 1842 by Patrick Macrory.

How do you do that? To "touchstone" the books? That is a great feature.

When you click on "Post a message," a column labeled "Touchstones" should appear to the right of the message box explaining how to do it. Basically, you just type single brackets around each book title you want to touchstone, and double brackets around the author's name. Then anyone who wants to explore further can click on the book title or author's name for more information. Cool, huh?

Very cool....and very simple....thanks.

I also strongly recommend "(The Mulberry Empire) by ((Philip Hensher)). It is an historical novel of essentially the British struggle to subdue Afghanistan. History repeats itself again. The British struggle to control the country took place in the 19th century and it covers the important historical event (well at least to the British) of a massacre of British soldiers but also women and children. This is historical fiction at its best. I will quote from the cover,

"In the spring of 1859, some fifty thousand British forces entered Afghanistan with the full pomp of Empire, possessed of the certainty that they would place the Amir with someone less hostile toward their ally, the King of the Punjab. Three years later, a single British horseman rode out of the Afghan mountains into India--the sole survivor of the original vast contingent"

In those days it was not necessary to make up a moral reason to invade. British interests were paramount, particularly trade interests. When they felt even slightly embarassed, they had a moral reason to fall back on and it was very simple. They were bringing Christianity to these heathen people.

The book is an important reminder of the futility of empire and the impossibility of maintaining it indefinitely.

What also stayed with me was the sorrow of this land and the city of Kabul. Will they ever be free and will they ever find peace and security for ordinary people, or will they remain a battle ground for another century?

It should not be too difficult to find this book. Mr Hensher is quite a prominent British author. The book I have is the US 1st ed, 2002, published by Knopf, NY. It is likely out in paperback.

The Mulberry Empire looks like a must-read, and I had not heard of it before. Thanks!

#7 Bhowell, The proper character for Touchstoning is the bracket "", not the parentheses "()".

The Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher.

BTW, I have a copy of The Great Game on my TBR stack.

Well now, that's interesting. I tried posting just an empty pair of brackets, but they vanished. Let me try this. Brackets: . Nope. Anyway, brackets, not parentheses.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Hosseini is also a great novel set in Afghanistan and might even be a better comparison to The Swallows of Kabul. I seem to remember that The Kite Runner begins in an earlier time period where as Splendid Suns and Swallows follow daily life in Kabul under the Taliban. All three are excellent books, though!

Another interesting choice is Looking for the Mahdi by N. Lee Wood. You can find my review here
http://www.librarything.com/work/374941/book/26001576

The country the action takes place in is a composite of several areas. I found the book interesting because of the way it crosses genre lines: part political commentary, part general fiction and part spy novel with a little next generation broadcast journalistic electronics thrown in.

Looking for the Mahdi is not as gripping as Hosseini's books because Mahdi does not seem as real. Mahdi also focuses on external influences in politics while Hosseini's books focus on internal politics.

I'd be interested in a more extended comparison with Looking for the Mahdi. While I haven't read it, I'm intrigued by the different perspective as suggested in your review #12, and some of the Amazon reader-reviews.

Both of Hosseini's novels suggest that the larger political environment in Afghanistan reflected the nonpolitical cruelties and injustices perpetrated by individuals, but also vice-versa - it seemed like a vicious cycle in which the Taliban world-view was accepted because it was not very different from the individual relationships people were already accepting, and the individual cruelties were accepted because the larger society accepted them as normal or even desirable.

Although written after the war in Afghanistan began, both The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns tell stories rooted in pre-Taliban days.

Give a little bit, margad, I'm going to work on this off line.

The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra is a really powerful story. The author is actually Algerian, and a former member of their military. (And a man... the penname is his wife's.) I was really interested when he came out with a book set in Afghanistan, since most of his other fiction is set in North Africa.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention that the first book I read of Khadra's was In the Name of God which is set in Algeria during the 1990s. It made me think of their civil war years in a way that reading formal nonfiction histories hadn't quite done. (The movie "Rachida" did so too, as the film "Osama" did for me with Afghanistan.)

Will definitely read The Kite Runner now too...

I recommend The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (a nom de plume) about an assimilated Israeli arab, non-believer, successful surgeon, former Bedouin whose wife becomes a suicide bomber without ever letting on to him that she was anything but happy.

The hero's perfect happy life is shattered in a moment and it never recovers.

It is an amazing book, and shows the deep bitterness of the Palestinians at the loss of their country and their independence, and the inability of the Israelis and the Palestinians to resolve the conflicts and prevent the injustices and the violence.
I posted this in another group, but readers here might be interested also.

#12 From your review: "This is a difficult book to classify, other than just calling it Fiction."

Er, the correct term is "science fiction". N Lee Wood, Norman Spinrad's partner (or she was when the book was published) self-identifies as a science fiction writer, and Looking for the Mahdi was published by a science fiction publisher.

Having said that, I was a little disappointed by her depiction of the Middle East. The Arabic throughout was, well, wrong. The author admitted to me that she'd consulted expatriate Afghanis and the like in Paris (where she lived).

OTOH, the science fictional aspects of the novel were handled really well.

adding to the discussion of the Kite Runner

This is in regard to the Kite Runner. I read the book several years ago in a book group and came away with thinking it was a good book but not a great book and i could not figure out what all the fuss was about. I did here the author speak a few times and I really enjoyed listening to him speak.

THen the other night I watched the movie version. Watching the movie i realized something that i had missed before. Its the seen in the movie where he learns that his father "slept with the help" so to speak. The adult son gets angry upon learning this he says his father lied to him. It is after this point in the film that he finally gets a backbone. The point that I got from this was that as long as he saw his father as a "god" or perfect he was doomed to remain a boy but once he came to realize that his father was just a flawed human being like the rest of us he could then take on the responsiblities of being a man.

does anyone else have a thought on this?

This is pretty interesting #18, because my father was a minister and I came late to the concept of my parents being flawed human beings like everyone else. I think you're completely correct about not being able to grow into an adult until you recognize your parents are flawed. I'm a sucker for novels about guilt, so The Kite Runner totally hooked me. In the later chapters, though, the novel seemed to switch from being a literary novel to being a thriller. It still kept me hooked, because of the extreme suspense, but even while I was reading, I felt disappointed by the lack of idea material to carry with me after I finished reading. As you say, a good, even a very good book, but it missed greatness. Still - how many novels are that good?

I was actually hit pretty hard by The Kite Runner. I thought it did a good job with its themes of guilt and coming to grips with a new perspective on one's past.

I am now reading DeNiro's Game- it is fast paced and quite "atmospheric" regarding living as a young man through the militia wars of Beirut.

The problem with Kite Runner and co is that in the end these are writers playing to the western audience and if you know the middle east well, as well as have read Ed Said, you'd know that these books are popular for precisely that reason.

If I had to pick a book, it would be Ghada Karmi's In Search of Fatima, her beautiful memoir.

Can you say a little more about this aamirq? Authors that play to the Western audience may be doing so, at least in part, in the hope of gaining more Western attention to some things that matter greatly to these authors. But I wonder if you're suggesting that there are distortions in some of these novels that leave an inaccurate impression of the Middle East and its people. I'd be interested in learning more of your ideas about this.

In Search of Fatima looks good.

I'll put in a word for Elias Khoury. His Gate of the sun is fantastic. Really liked Yalo and Little mountain as well.

Margad, I hope you are still reading this thread - seems you left me a note two years ago!

The point that I was making was that too many books around middle east essentially say: "how can we save these people from themselves?" Kite Runner, however brilliant fell into that category.

Do read Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa. You should find plenty of reviews and discussions from other LibraryThingers. It is a historical fiction based on the Israel-Palestine conflict rendered by a Palestinian refugee (Amal).

Speaking of Gate of the Sun, has anyone seen the movie?

Hi, aamirq - yes, I'm still checking in from time to time. I know what you mean about the tone of many novels about the Middle East. Although The Kite Runner was written by an Afghan author, it was certainly written with the intent of appealing to a primarily American audience. I did get the sense that an appeal was being made for Americans to continue working to try to set things on a better track in Afghanistan. Since this thread got started in 2007 (how time does fly!), it has become clear that the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan has not achieved the kind of rapid democratization Americans like to imagine they can export to other parts of the world. I'd have to agree that people everywhere (the U.S. very definitely included) are ultimately responsible for saving themselves. A Thousand Splendid Suns moves a bit more in that direction, I think. It was a harsh novel, very hard to read in places, but the abused wife finally takes on the responsibility for protecting herself when she learns no one else will take care of her.

Ii loved THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL. Try TALIBAN by Rashid.