The Political Impact of a Work of Fiction — Review of “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini
I suspect that it will prove to be important not as a literary work, but rather for its emotional and political impact — like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
At first I read it as fiction set in an exotic environment, where culture, religion, and law are so different from what we are familiar with that it’s like a galaxy far, far away.
But then two transformations took place. first, the characters are so well drawn and so sympathetic that I identified strongly with them; and as they endured and survived one outrage after another, I felt like I’d lived through those events with them. Then, near the end, after about 30 years of narrative, I started to recognize some of the political characters and events. I had caught glimpses of that “current history” on the news, after 9/11. And I began to realize the effect of the actions of the US government on the lives of these people who I now cared so much about.
Earlier, I had found it ironic and amusing that these people, especially the women, were much better off when the Russians were in control. But at that point, I was still reading at an emotional distance.
The pivotal passage is a page which seems to be a simple translation, without commentary, of a Taliban edict, issued when they took control of the country. The understated, matter-of-fact words bring home that the brutality and injustice are not the result of a passing whim of an insane dictator, but rather stem from the culture. The fact that the new rules and laws require no explanation and no justification makes them seem nearly inescapable.
After that, the nightmare these characters live through becomes holographically horrific.
The Taliban come across as so villainous that I couldn’t help but see Bush’s intervention in Afghanistan as the best thing that could have possibly happened for Afghanistan.
So here I am, believing that the Iraq War was a terrible mistake and that we should get out of there as soon as possible. Here I am, rooting against Bush’s every move, like I root against the New York Yankees. And now, all of a sudden, I see post-9/11 events from a different perspective, and I’m shocked to recognize my favorite villain as the hero in the white hat coming to the rescue of the Afghani people, who are so in need of and so deserving of all the help they can get. And I start to suspect that the situation in Iraq under Saddam Hussein was comparable.
At least that is my immediate reaction from reading this book — and normally I tend to be biased and inflexible in my political views.
I don’t know what the long-term effect of this reading experience will be, but I suspect that at the very least I will now consider the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq as extremely complex, with lots of gray, and no simple solutions, but needing solutions. And I will be concerned that in reaction to the present mess over there, the people of the US could become isolationist, defensively moving away from trying to help deal with problems on the other side of the world.
“A Thousand Splendid Suns” is not just another novel…
Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com