Pedestrian View

As usual, I’m several years behind the book club curve, but I finally got around to Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner over break. It’s a definite must read in these times.

The well drawn characters of Baba and Hassan, and riveting, painful scenes move the novel along, but what was most compelling to me was the portrait of Afghanistan as it moved from pre-Russian invasion, through the invasion era, and finally to the Taliban period. I was terribly ignorant of much of this and was particularly struck by two things.

One was the ethnic antagonism between Pashtun and Hazara. I’m forever flabbergasted that such human hatred exists in the world, and forever surprised to find out about a new history of butchery. We’ve been hearing about the genocide in Darfur for awhile now, not to mention the Sunni/Shi’a mess in Iraq, and currently the same news echoes out of Kenya. I grew up loving maps, but I’m realizing again how false the lines of Nations, mostly drawn by the West, divide up the world. It’s not that simple.

The other thing that sticks with me is the violence, duplicity, and oppression of the Taliban. Granted, Hosseini is writing fiction, but I have to believe that the things he portrays are at least a partial reflection of actual Talibanic events. How any group could justify such events as being of God is absolutely unfathomable, except that it’s been done some many times throughout history it shouldn’t surprise anyone. God must get really tired of that.

While the long section about the narrator’s courtship was a tedious contrast to the rest of the novel, and the way that the circularity of events closes was almost too perfect to believe, Hosseini avoids an easy ending. I’m going to read A Thousand Splendid Suns soon.

Catching up with the classics, and with my daughter and her AP English class, I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness over break, too. What can I say, except perhaps, “Oh! The horror!”

I remember reading Moby Dick a few years back and feeling the same way. I’m glad I read it, but it wasn’t easy.

As sort of a pre-psychological exploration of “madness,” Kurtz and Marlowe are interesting portraits of someone gone mad with power, and someone obsessed with someone mad with power. It’s also a very damning portrait (unintentional on Conrad’s part, I think) of colonialism. Chinua Achebe long ago labeled Conrad a racist, and rightly so.

There are two other things I found difficult about reading it. One is that Conrad gives no one else besides Kurtz and Marlowe names, a stylistic choice, no doubt, emphasizing that neither character values anything about the world beyond their own obsessions. The other European characters get labels (ie. the manager, the Russian) and the natives are described in barely animalistic terms (hence the racism charge). While I could see Conrad’s reason for this choice, I found it difficult to engage with the novel as a reader. The effect of all these vaguely described characters kept everything at too much of a distance for my liking.

The other barrier for me is that Conrad just tends to prattle on. Hemingway would have captured a ten page Conrad scene in two sentences.

Still, I’m glad to have read it, and I’m looking forward to seeing Apocalypse Now again soon.