TWIB-III: 21 (3/02-3/08)
Mar. 15th, 2009 01:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanI read one book during the week of March 2-8, which proved that just because it's enormously popular, it doesn't mean it's earth-shattering.
1) The Kite Runner – Khaled Housseni
The Kite Runner is a decent effort for a first novel but nowhere near deserving of all the hype, especially given the precipitous drop in narrative quality in its second half. The story starts off well enough, chronicling the relationships between the main character, his distant father, and their ethnic minority households servants, set against the background of 20th century Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, it quickly devolves into laughable soap opera melodramatics, a series of happ(ily unbelievable) narrative coincidences, trite "shocking revelations," and two-dimensional writing that quickly reduces the characters to caricatures of their primary characteristics, all of which belies the book's pretensions to gritty realism.
Some random examples: Hassan strikes me as a deeply, manipulatively passive aggressive character, but I get the idea Housseni intends readers to accept his saintlike behavior at face value. Perhaps Housseni knows of FOB immigrants who've created comfortable upper-middle class lifestyles as authors of fiction and school teachers in Reagan-era America, but I've never met any. While I'm sure depicting the Taliban leadership as sociopathic, homosexual, drug-addicted, Caucasian neo-Nazi sodomizers of children appeals to the black-and-white worldview of a certain segment of Oprah's Book Club readers, it does little to illuminate the complexities involved in the Afghanistan conflict in general or religious extremism in particular. Finally, the ham-fisted narrative parallels not only destroy the credibility of the book's earlier half, they render its big reveals eminently predictable to anyone who's read more than four or five novels in her lifetime.
Housseni's technical skills as a writer could also use some work. He frequently resorts to fragments. Of sentences. To make sure. Readers realise. That what he's about to say. Is. Important. And anytime a narrator tells readers that he knows cliches are overused and lifeless, then goes on to employ those self-same cliches in the next sentence, well...
That said, the book is an easy and easily digestible read perfect for an airport layover or wait in a doctor's office. Just don't turn to it looking for something to make you think or offer a new perspective on the Afghanistan conflict.
That will be all.
1) The Kite Runner – Khaled Housseni
The Kite Runner is a decent effort for a first novel but nowhere near deserving of all the hype, especially given the precipitous drop in narrative quality in its second half. The story starts off well enough, chronicling the relationships between the main character, his distant father, and their ethnic minority households servants, set against the background of 20th century Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, it quickly devolves into laughable soap opera melodramatics, a series of happ(ily unbelievable) narrative coincidences, trite "shocking revelations," and two-dimensional writing that quickly reduces the characters to caricatures of their primary characteristics, all of which belies the book's pretensions to gritty realism.
Some random examples: Hassan strikes me as a deeply, manipulatively passive aggressive character, but I get the idea Housseni intends readers to accept his saintlike behavior at face value. Perhaps Housseni knows of FOB immigrants who've created comfortable upper-middle class lifestyles as authors of fiction and school teachers in Reagan-era America, but I've never met any. While I'm sure depicting the Taliban leadership as sociopathic, homosexual, drug-addicted, Caucasian neo-Nazi sodomizers of children appeals to the black-and-white worldview of a certain segment of Oprah's Book Club readers, it does little to illuminate the complexities involved in the Afghanistan conflict in general or religious extremism in particular. Finally, the ham-fisted narrative parallels not only destroy the credibility of the book's earlier half, they render its big reveals eminently predictable to anyone who's read more than four or five novels in her lifetime.
Housseni's technical skills as a writer could also use some work. He frequently resorts to fragments. Of sentences. To make sure. Readers realise. That what he's about to say. Is. Important. And anytime a narrator tells readers that he knows cliches are overused and lifeless, then goes on to employ those self-same cliches in the next sentence, well...
That said, the book is an easy and easily digestible read perfect for an airport layover or wait in a doctor's office. Just don't turn to it looking for something to make you think or offer a new perspective on the Afghanistan conflict.
That will be all.
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no subject
on 2009-03-14 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-15 04:35 am (UTC)I'm probably not the intended audience anyway; I remember going shopping with ma famile at the ME markets in Detroit/Ann Arbor since I was a kid.