Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I'll start out right away by saying that A Thousand Splendid Suns was not a fun book. It was pretty horrible at times, and with strong themes of domestic violence and female oppression, it's not going to be for everyone... so please be warned.

But it's also an incredibly powerful book. I won't go so far as to say I enjoyed it, because enjoyment isn't exactly the right word for what I was feeling... but of what I did feel, I felt a lot. it was deeply affecting, wonderfully written, with a gripping story and characters that kept me turning the page even as I winced at the descriptions and wished the characters out of their current situations.

Set in Afghanistan, in time ranging from the 70s to the beginning of the Afghanistan war, it follows the lives of two women. Mariam has grown up in a kolba mud hut, the illegitimate child of a wealthy man. At the age of fifteen she is married off to a much older man, and sent to Kabul, far from her home. Laila was born in Kabul, to progressive parents. She is bright and ambitious, and focused on schooling, intending to study and to go to university. When Taliban rule changes everything for women in Afghanistan, Mariam and Laila find themselves thrown together, just trying to get by in a world where being a second-class citizen would be a few steps up from where they are.

What struck me most about this book is how well all the characters are developed. There are people from many different backgrounds and realities, and each of them felt intensely real: which made the events of the book all the more difficult to handle. Mariam and Laila are completely different women, but they are united because they are suffering under the same oppression. In the whole cast, there are no heroes, just people, living as real people do, some noble and some not. Even the characters that I would class as 'villains' were well-rounded, and complex, rather than just flat-out evil. Most importantly I believed all of them. They felt real, they existed. The writing made it come to life, in all its horrific detail.

As I said earlier, this book is not for the faint-hearted. Laila's life starts out being fairly happy-go-lucky, but the war quickly destroys everything she knew and loved. Mariam was born into a hard life, and it doesn't get easy at any point in the novel, from her secluded upbringing with her strongly disillusioned mother, to life with her abusive husband.

The book is clearly written by someone that feels very strongly about the issues laid out in the book. It doesn't feel like it's deliberately set out to educate foreigners, but it does feel incredibly well researched and realised. Throughout the book and all the things that happen, there's a strong undercurrent that the author finds it abhorrent, which makes some of it slightly easier to stomach. Slightly.

And the writing... I find it hard to define why one writer is good and another is not. However, I can say that Hosseini's writing is very easy to follow. It flowed well. The dialogue felt realistic (in that dialogue-is-the-best-of-real-speech way). The chapters are short, which meant that I got to the end of one instantly wanting to start the next to find out what happens. The descriptions paint a broad picture, leaving your mind to fill in the details. It was one of the best written books I've read in a while.

I have my reservations in recommending this book, because the content made it really hard to read at times... but it was incredibly well written, and had a strong message. It felt like the whole book was saying this is what it was like, which I found both challenging, interesting, compelling.

Of course, this book has been out for some years now, so if you wanted to, you've probably already read it... But if you haven't, and you do intend to, then I recommend doing so when you're neither very happy or very sad: the former and it will bring you down with a crunch, the latter and you will be a weeping mess. It's best approached when you're feeling grounded and resilient... and even then don't expect to come out unscathed.

And I'd recommend having a happier book on stand-by to read afterwards. And possibly chocolate.

Review of the End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas

I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I have to say it's one of the reasons I first picked this book up. It's an odd size and shape, with black-lined pages, so it does stand out from the crowd. I don't really know what I was expecting from that. A friend who'd previously read it said that it was good, but by the time I came to read it, I couldn't even remember what the blurb on the back said.

I'll say now, it was a pretty compulsive read. The last book I read (the third in a trilogy, which I'm not sure I could review without spoiling the whole trilogy because the ending was so disappointing), took over a month, despite the fact that it was compelling. I started Mr Y last weekend when I had very little else to do, but nonetheless it made the time fly by happily, and I read the whole book within a week, which goes to show that if nothing else, it was very readable.

Without wanting to give too much away, The End of Mr Y is about a PhD student, Ariel Manto, studying thought experiments in science and literature, who finds a book (The End of Mr Y), of which there is only supposed to be one copy left in existence. The book is supposed to be cursed, so that anyone who reads it will die. And so it leads to smiles and happiness, obviously...

Ariel is an interesting main character; she's flawed, but believable, which makes it possible to really identify with her as she's facing things. She's also intelligent and well-read, and so a relatively large portion of the book is her explaining or debating various aspects of philosophy and metaphysics with the people she meets along the way. It's a little odd at time, but I have to say it contains one of the best explanations of quantum theory that I've ever read. My biggest criticism of this is that sometimes the discussions get a little too one-sided; Ariel thinking aloud to one or other avid listener. But all the people she's talking to tend to be very well-educated, so even this has just enough realism that it doesn't become annoying.

The plot winds carefully through various problems, and solutions, and some interesting things crop up along the way. I can't say I agreed with the underlying structure of the world that the book was trying to imply, but it was definitely an interesting and riveting idea... and ideas is really what science fiction is all about. I wanted slightly more out of the ending than I got; I think some of the emotion was drained out of it, which was a little sad. But it didn't detract from the brilliance of the lead-up (unlike the aforementioned trilogy I just finished).

One of the things I like most about the book is that it bends genres a bit. It's nominally science fiction, but with heavy elements of (low) fantasy, while the setting is contemporary. On plot alone, it might have become one of those rare accessible science fiction books, like The Handmaid's Tale... but the heavy debate sections probably lean it back towards the genre fans.

All in all, I'm glad I judged this particular book by its cover enough to pick it up and buy it. It was a great read, and I was thoroughly entertained all the way through. Recommended.