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Left Field Luxe's "Two Books From Every Country" Book Review Series

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
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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
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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!
 
Hurrah, here is the second review. A for Albania this time. I have reviewed two books by Albanian writers exploring a fascinating aspect of northern Albanian history and culture, the Kanun. This little known ancient customary law has regulated Albania's "blood feuds" for hundreds of years. And it has proved interesting fodder for the country's modern novelists. Like with Afghanistan, one of the books reviewed is a classic written by an iconic author and one is a wild card written by a lesser known novelist.

The Classic
Broken April
By Ismail Kadare
1978

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Broken April is a story about what happens next when 26-year-old Gjorg Berisha, who lives in Albania’s feudal high plateau, is compelled to murder a neighbour. He must avenge the death of his brother in line with the laws of Albania’s medieval honour code, known as the Kanun. Many readers will be struck by the fact that the Kanun is no fictional conception of Kadare’s. It is historical fact that northern Albanians lived by the Kanun for centuries.

According to this same Kanun, the family of Gjorg’s victim have the right to avenge the slaughtered man by killing Gjorg following a bessa, or a 30-day truce. The plot starts to morph into a gnarled romance novel when Gjorg embarks on a journey to another village to pay a customary regional “blood tax” during his bessa. He runs into Bessian Vorpsis and his new bride Diana while they are on an intrepid honeymoon in the high plateau. Diana and Gjorg become fixated with each other and after their brief initial encounter each one yearns to see the other again. All this plays out as Gjorg’s final month of living, the broken month of April, slips away.

The story reads like a bardic fable. The exact period of time in the 20th century is unclear but I personally imagined it to be the former half of the 20th century, perhaps before the Second World War.

The narrator maintains a grey neutrality throughout: Kadare merely describes the dismal judgements and unquestioned authority of the Kanun, he does not critique or analyse. In that he gives the reader the space to grapple with the absurd logic of the Kanun and the consequences of institutionalised vengeance on their own. But most of all, this novel raises the troubling issue of what vengeance becomes when it is reduced to the hollow expression of an abstract system of logic. In Broken April, killing is devoid of the emotions that we often associate it with: passion, hatred, anger. There is only thoughtless duty and grim pragmatism, although Gjorg’s reluctance provides us with a sliver of reassurance.

The “majestic and terrifying” Kanun is enthralling. Kadare grants the reader insight into some unexpected outcomes of its logic, such as the fact that people from the high plateau often perceive travellers as gods in disguise. Kadare explains that this is because of their ability to unwittingly plunge villages into wars lasting decades. This happens when these strangers themselves become the target of locals by offending them with their ignorance of local customs. We learn that this is, indeed, the origins of the cycle of violence that Gjorg has become wrapped up in...... [Read the rest of the review here]

The Wild Card

Sworn Virgin
By Elvira Dones, translated by Clarissa Botsford
May 2014

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Sworn Virgin, originally written in Italian, is a novel set between the 1980s and early 2000s. It focuses on the life of Hana Doda, a female university dropout from Albania’s northern mountain region (exactly the same region where Broken April is set). She is obsessed with poetry (especially Emily Dickinson). The book is also about a man called Mark Doda, a recluse who lives in the northern Albanian mountains and spends more time smoking than cleaning up after himself. From the outset of the novel we are duly informed that Hana and Mark are in fact the same person.

Sworn Virgin is an ambitious attempt by Elvira Dones to tackle a rare but nonetheless startling Albanian tradition. In line with northern Albania’s Kanun honour code, traceable back to the 15th century, females in families without sons (something which was not uncommon as a result of the Kanun’s “blood feud” code- see Broken April) are permitted to “become” male. They do this by wearing mens clothes, behaving like men and swearing to keep their virginity. The practice is largely extinct now but there are a smattering of present-day cases. Sworn Virgin is the product of Dones’ painstaking interviews with many of these intriguing women who live on as men today.

Hana becomes a man when her only living male guardian, her uncle, becomes ill with cancer. She drops out of university in the Albanian capital, Tirana, to look after him. Transformation into a man gains appeal for Hana as it becomes too dangerous and socially unacceptable for her as a woman to travel alone to get him medicine. When Hana’s dying uncle tries to marry her off so that she has a male guardian when he is no longer alive, Hana resists and vows to become a man instead as a compromise. She becomes Mark.

This part of the story is set in the 1980s. Dones weaves in a parallel narrative, which takes place in the early 2000s; Mark escapes the mountains to emigrate to America where he has a cousin, and start a new life as a woman again- as Hana.

The problem is that this inspired and highly unusual concept for a novel is severely let down by the fact that the book itself is either badly written or badly translated.

The novel is in the present tense for no apparently good reason; Dones’ shows no particular concern or skill for experimenting with stream of consciousness narration.

This book is also dense with limp and unimaginative description, which should never have survived the final editing stage.....[Read the rest of the review here]

Watch out for my Algeria book reviews, I'll be posting them on here soon...

 
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