Further Afghanistan material

The second book of my book club was another Afghanistan-centric work, The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. It's a quick and easy read, and although it is not all that illuminating in many ways, it does give a snapshot of one person's fascinating journey through that country, and at least an idea about what it is like in the rural hamlets that comprise much of the population.

Rory Stewart never explains why it is he decided to walk across Asia. For whatever reason, he walked across India, Nepal, Iran, and other Asian countries. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, he took the opportunity to walk across that land as well (he had previously been denied access to the country by the Taliban). Stewart walks through the middle of the country, from Herat to Kabul, braving sometimes unfriendly villagers, treacherous mountain passes in the dead of winter, and various other obstacles. It's quite the concept, and yields a fair amount of striking moments. The prose is matter of fact and dry, though sometimes you can sense Stewart's sense of humor just below the surface.

However, the book does suffer from a sort of sameness. The belt of villages that Stewart walks through, and relies on to feed and shelter him, are all fairly similar. There is a familiar motion to finding the appropriate local chieftan to appeal to in each village and avoiding the same sorts of pitfalls each time. And though the journey must have been incredibly difficult, I rarely got the sense from the walking descriptions of exactly how tiring it must be. I believe that Stewart was in many ways lucky to survive at all, particularly when accounting for the dysentary he seems to always have, his lack of mastery of the language, and his travel through areas that had heavy support for the Taliban still.

One moment that was among my favorite in the book: Stewart has just come into another poor dwelling hoping to find nourishment. It is a typical mud hut with no power or amenities; it does, however, have a poster on the wall. "[The] poster showed a yellow convertible sports car parked outside a Swiss chalet with flower-decked balconies. Printed below in capital letters in English was: ANYONE WHO HAS EVER STRUGGLED WITH POVERTY KNOWS HOW EXTREMELY EXCITING IT IS TO BE POOR. Our host had bought the poster in Herat and asked me to translate it. I told him I could not understand the inscription." Irony of that passage aside, I think that would make an excellent T-shirt.

The main lesson to be drawn in my opinion from Stewart's work is that Afghanistan is not in any way to be mistaken for a uniform nation. The people do not think of themselves in national terms, and the ethnic, religious, and feudal ties are much more important to them than any action being taken supposedly in their name by a distant government in Kabul. The things that matter are of course the things that affect our day to day lives. It is a depressing book in the sense that virtually no one the author meets cares at all about human rights or really any ideal whatsoever beyond what it is to be a Muslim (indeed there is a very interesting chapter about how Bush and Blair misconstrue Muslim belief). Stewart walked a long and difficult journey, but as thinking about this book makes clear, the journey toward a humane planet will be much longer.

A Long, Hard Slog

I don't know if there's such a thing as a casual Huxley fan, but if there is, this is not the book for that person. This second of six volumes of Huxley's essays contains many of the same trials and rewards of the first volume. It covers the years 1926 to 1929 and topics ranging from politics to philosophy to art to travel writing. My major criticism is that much of this work, written as short magazine pieces at the time, has not really stood the test of time, nor was it meant to. The section on art fares particularly badly.

However, this volume does contain some longer pieces where Huxley has more room to sketch out some thoughts more broadly on issues of philosophical and scientific importance, including a short section on eugenics, which he later comes back to in his most famous novel, Brave New World. Also, the travel section contains some interesting nuggets, particularly his views, as a liberal Englishman travelling through occupied India during the time of Ghandi's movement for independence. As you might expect, he is somewhat conflicted, re-emphasizing to me how issues that appear very clear in retrospect can often seem intractable as they are being lived, even to the brightest among us. Fun to compare Huxley's impressions to those of Orwell in "Shooting an Elephant," one of my all-time favorite essays.

Still, these works were never really meant to be read back to back and it is not fun or easy to get through this book. Rumsfeld's phrase from the title of this post is maybe a bit overblown, but I never miss an opportunity to quote Rummy. Huxley is undeniably good at wordplay and spending time with him has its pleasures, but this collection is too much effort for too little payoff.

Koontz Achieves Mediocrity

Phantoms is far and away better than most Koontz novels--which is to say that it achieves the level of mediocrity. It's a straight up creature story--you can see the 1998 film if you want to understand the plot. I saw it back when I was in high school and enjoyed it, even though I am a distinct minority in that respect. I think remembering the film helped me to enjoy the book more than previous Koontz work. It's still got awful dialogue and poor characterization, but the monster is relatively interesting. Also, it's grislier than previous Koontz books I've read. The plot holes are enormous as well, but there are a few creepy moments and I'll simply take what I can get from Koontz. Not a bad beach book.

Kite Runner Underwhelms

The Kite Runner is the first selection I have read for the book club I joined this year. I was pleased with the selection for a few reasons: 1) it's a book we have here at home, so I didn't have to buy it. 2) It seems like many of my friends have read and enjoyed it. 3) It is a best-selling novel that did not look like pure drivel. So I'm happy that book club will help me get out of reading ruts, but, as the following paragraphs will testify to, this novel did not do the trick for me.

Kite Runner is not a bad book, but one that fails to adequately grapple with the questions it raises. Hosseini is a talented writer--his prose feels natural and unfettered. I was initially excited to see the way the power relationships were going to play out--the servant and master both on an individual scale and in the realm of international politics. The stage certainly felt set for an exploration of class conflict. Our protagonist is one of the privileged few in Afganistan, but has a special relationship with the son of their family's servant. However, his inability to act in a moment of crisis--his inability to risk his place in the social order--lead to tragic results that haunt him into adulthood. By the same token, though the novel doesn't delve deeply into this, the Russians in the 1980s were a privileged nation, able to make Afganistan suffer on their behalf with few consequences.

However, the story suffers a serious breakdown in the second half, subsituting coincidences that are frankly unacceptable and abandoning characterization in favor of stereotype. We don't really get much insight into the cultural and social forces that drive out the Russians, but institute their own brand of militaristic and religious oppression. In this novel, the Taliban represent evil without any nuance--one particular antagonist even professes an admiration for Hitler. This is a transparent and desperate move on the part of Hosseini, who wants us to hate this charcter, but is apparently unwilling to give him the full scope of his humanity and instead resorts to this ridiculous shorthand. The end neatly wraps up the events without asking us to think very hard about what's happened in Afganistan and what is still happening. We are, conviently, also never asked to consider what, if any, role America has in the state of Afganistan today, and the ongoing American invasion is mentioned only in passing. We can go on sitting in Starbucks, reading the Post, and shaking our heads sadly at the state of Afgani affairs, safe from any impolite questions that the Kite Runner could have raised.

Kite Runner has some splendid moments, and is undoubtedly better than most of the fare that makes the bestseller lists. It's obviously better than many of the books I have written about on this site in the last few months, but considering its potential, the book is a real let-down. In the end, it is much less than the sum of it's parts.

P.S. For reasons unknown to me, this post will not publish showing the customary spaces between paragraphs--I will simply have to trust that my intrepid readers can ascertain where said breaks should go. Apologies.