LeftFieldLuxe
New Member
Hello,
I am Sherelle, the editor of Left Field Luxe magazine. It's an online travel magazine but I have started a book review section where the publication is reviewing two books ( a "classic" and a "wild card") from every country in the world. In alphabetical order.
I kicked things off with two exceptionally compelling reads of Afghan origin, and I would like to share the reviews here.
My "classic" choice was A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, the award-winning author of The Kite Runner.
My "wild card" was a brand new compilation of poems called A Beggar Of The World. These come straight from the mouth of Afghan women and have been translated from Pashto into English.
I have pasted some extracts of my commentary below but you can read the full reviews by clicking the links at the bottom of each of the extracts. Hope you enjoy:
The Classic Choice
A Thousand Splendid Suns
By Khaled Hosseini
January 2008
Khaled Hosseini is better known for his formidably successful first novel, The Kite Runner (2003). It was a tale of fraught male friendships and a tainted relationship between a father and son. The soundtrack was Afghanistan’s fractious and disturbed history, from the fall of the monarchy to the rise of the Taliban. In his first work, Hosseini established himself as a storyteller gifted with the ability to make a novel set in war readable and humane. And fiercely capable of delivering rare snippets of real life in a country that, for all its media coverage, still seems mysterious and remote to most of us. Although Hosseini’s critics were few, some questioned whether his characters were too sharply cut. Whether a weakness for melodramatic plots and meaningful endings had got the better of him.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is The Kite Runner’s female-focused counterpart. The protagonists are two women this time. It is also set in Afghanistan, spanning the Soviet invasion and the rise and fall of the Taliban. The book starts off in Herat exploring the world of Mariam. She is the bastard daughter of a wealthy father who cannot welcome her into his family fold for fear of losing face. Her childhood with her epileptic and emotionally abusive mother is one of remoteness and drudgery. Things get even worse for Mariam when her mother eventually kills herself, and Mariam is married off to a violent and obscene older shoemaker called Rasheed in Kabul.
With the story then firmly placed in Kabul, the narrative abruptly switches to Laila, a flighty and vivacious daughter of an intellectual who lives in the same neighbourhood as Rasheed. Her comfortable life starts to crumble when her lover Tariq flees for the Pakistani border with his family. It is then outright detonated when one of the warlord factions vying for control of Kabul after the Soviet occupation blasts her house with a rocket. Her family are killed. Lost and alone, Rasheed manipulates the newly orphaned Laila to become his second wife.
The story then develops around the determined and protective friendship that blossoms between the two wives, Laila and Mariam. How they support each other dealing with systematic physical abuse from their husband. How their female friendship produces sparks of hope as the dark days of female oppression under the Taliban descend on them. The story culminates in an ultimate sacrifice.
The novel delivers some brilliant insights into everyday life during periods of Afghan history that are now legendary. For example, we learn how the summer before the US invasion, the people of Kabul were going mad over the blockbuster Titanic. Even though the Taliban had banned TVs, many had dug them away at the bottom of their gardens. They risked dragging them back to their living rooms to watch pirate versions of the Leonardo Di Caprio film.......... [Read the rest of the review here]
The Wild Card
I am The Beggar Of The World
Translated by Eliza Griswold
April 2014
This is not a novel. It is a compilation of poems from a range of Afghan women, translated from Pashto into English by Eliza Griswold. She and photographer Seamus Murphy travelled to Afghanistan in 2012 after learning about a teenage girl, Rahila Muska, who burned herself to death after she was beaten by her brothers and ordered to stop writing poems.
Griswold has collected a wide range of two-line poems, known as landays, from women all over the country. These are the voices of not just city women but those from refugee camps and remote villages as well.
Landays are two lines long and 22 syllables, ending in ma or na. They deal with topics ranging from sex, love and the American invasion to separation and the Taliban. I Am The Begger Of The World features not just poems but a startling collection of photographs by Murphy too, which help to further bring this work of literature to life.
Reading this poetry collection will destroy any views you may hold that Afghans do not enjoy a good filthy joke. No topic is taboo and many make bawdy, barely concealed references to sex, such as this one:
“For God’s sake, I’ll give you a kiss. Don’t fret!
Stop shaking my pitcher and getting me wet.”
And here is another:
“I’ll kiss you in the pomegranate garden. Hush!
People will think there’s a goat in the underbrush.”
There are even humorous landays about farting, which is an even more mortifying to do in public Afghanistan than in the West.....[Read the rest of the review here]
Thanks!
I am Sherelle, the editor of Left Field Luxe magazine. It's an online travel magazine but I have started a book review section where the publication is reviewing two books ( a "classic" and a "wild card") from every country in the world. In alphabetical order.
I kicked things off with two exceptionally compelling reads of Afghan origin, and I would like to share the reviews here.
My "classic" choice was A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, the award-winning author of The Kite Runner.
My "wild card" was a brand new compilation of poems called A Beggar Of The World. These come straight from the mouth of Afghan women and have been translated from Pashto into English.
I have pasted some extracts of my commentary below but you can read the full reviews by clicking the links at the bottom of each of the extracts. Hope you enjoy:
The Classic Choice
A Thousand Splendid Suns
By Khaled Hosseini
January 2008
Khaled Hosseini is better known for his formidably successful first novel, The Kite Runner (2003). It was a tale of fraught male friendships and a tainted relationship between a father and son. The soundtrack was Afghanistan’s fractious and disturbed history, from the fall of the monarchy to the rise of the Taliban. In his first work, Hosseini established himself as a storyteller gifted with the ability to make a novel set in war readable and humane. And fiercely capable of delivering rare snippets of real life in a country that, for all its media coverage, still seems mysterious and remote to most of us. Although Hosseini’s critics were few, some questioned whether his characters were too sharply cut. Whether a weakness for melodramatic plots and meaningful endings had got the better of him.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is The Kite Runner’s female-focused counterpart. The protagonists are two women this time. It is also set in Afghanistan, spanning the Soviet invasion and the rise and fall of the Taliban. The book starts off in Herat exploring the world of Mariam. She is the bastard daughter of a wealthy father who cannot welcome her into his family fold for fear of losing face. Her childhood with her epileptic and emotionally abusive mother is one of remoteness and drudgery. Things get even worse for Mariam when her mother eventually kills herself, and Mariam is married off to a violent and obscene older shoemaker called Rasheed in Kabul.
With the story then firmly placed in Kabul, the narrative abruptly switches to Laila, a flighty and vivacious daughter of an intellectual who lives in the same neighbourhood as Rasheed. Her comfortable life starts to crumble when her lover Tariq flees for the Pakistani border with his family. It is then outright detonated when one of the warlord factions vying for control of Kabul after the Soviet occupation blasts her house with a rocket. Her family are killed. Lost and alone, Rasheed manipulates the newly orphaned Laila to become his second wife.
The story then develops around the determined and protective friendship that blossoms between the two wives, Laila and Mariam. How they support each other dealing with systematic physical abuse from their husband. How their female friendship produces sparks of hope as the dark days of female oppression under the Taliban descend on them. The story culminates in an ultimate sacrifice.
The novel delivers some brilliant insights into everyday life during periods of Afghan history that are now legendary. For example, we learn how the summer before the US invasion, the people of Kabul were going mad over the blockbuster Titanic. Even though the Taliban had banned TVs, many had dug them away at the bottom of their gardens. They risked dragging them back to their living rooms to watch pirate versions of the Leonardo Di Caprio film.......... [Read the rest of the review here]
The Wild Card
I am The Beggar Of The World
Translated by Eliza Griswold
April 2014
This is not a novel. It is a compilation of poems from a range of Afghan women, translated from Pashto into English by Eliza Griswold. She and photographer Seamus Murphy travelled to Afghanistan in 2012 after learning about a teenage girl, Rahila Muska, who burned herself to death after she was beaten by her brothers and ordered to stop writing poems.
Griswold has collected a wide range of two-line poems, known as landays, from women all over the country. These are the voices of not just city women but those from refugee camps and remote villages as well.
Landays are two lines long and 22 syllables, ending in ma or na. They deal with topics ranging from sex, love and the American invasion to separation and the Taliban. I Am The Begger Of The World features not just poems but a startling collection of photographs by Murphy too, which help to further bring this work of literature to life.
Reading this poetry collection will destroy any views you may hold that Afghans do not enjoy a good filthy joke. No topic is taboo and many make bawdy, barely concealed references to sex, such as this one:
“For God’s sake, I’ll give you a kiss. Don’t fret!
Stop shaking my pitcher and getting me wet.”
And here is another:
“I’ll kiss you in the pomegranate garden. Hush!
People will think there’s a goat in the underbrush.”
There are even humorous landays about farting, which is an even more mortifying to do in public Afghanistan than in the West.....[Read the rest of the review here]
Thanks!