I've finally figured out why I'm not joining the "I Love Khaled Hosseini" fan club. I was significantly underwhelmed by The Kite Runner, and I finally read A Thousand Splendid Suns over the weekend and was similarly unimpressed. I realize that millions of people all over the world think these books are just wonderful, so who am I to gripe?
And yet: I just don't like his writing, and now I can tell you why. I figured out the problem after I noticed that at several points throughout A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini echoes certain phrases or ideas associated with Salman Rushdie. For instance, one of Hosseini's main characters is born on the date of an important historical event (as in Midnight's Children), and at some point the ground beneath her feet shakes--which evokes Rushdie's brilliant novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It doesn't really matter whether these echoes are intentional or otherwise; I'm certainly not going to complain about an author's facility with allusion.
What these allusions accomplished for me, though, was to juxtapose Hosseini's novels and Rushdie's in my mind, and Hosseini suffers in the comparison. Both authors create strong, memorable characters whose personal sufferings reflect violent public events, but there the resemblance ends. Hosseini competently wields two essential tools of fiction writing--character and plot--while Rushdie's toolbox is brimful of figurative language, inventive syntax, and images that give new life to tired ideas.
Hosseini's sentences sit on the page flatly conveying information, while Rushdie's sentences sing and dance across the page like caged birds suddenly released into the sunlight. Hosseini afflicts his characters with suffering that wrings readers' hearts for a while, but Rushdie transforms his characters' experiences into vivid images that prowl around in readers' minds, connect with other fragments of the collective unconscious, and spawn new offspring that will infest literature for a long time to come.
One example will demonstrate the difference: in A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini plays with the fine line between safety and imprisonment, creating a household in which the women are "protected" by being brutally controlled. The house where this happens is...just a house. Ordinary, mundane, unmemorable.
Rushdie juxtaposes the same safety/imprisonment dichotomy in the first section of Shame, but this is no ordinary house: Rushdie's house expands and contracts like a womb, first expelling its offspring in an act of bloody violence and eventually entombing him. This womb/tomb image returns subtly throughout the book, serving as a powerful image representing the violent birth pangs of Pakistan.
Hosseini's novel, while competent enough, never comes close to producing such a powerful image. His writing is prosaic, his language unmemorable, his imagery negligible. Which makes me wonder: why do so many millions of readers love his books?
6 comments:
Bev,
There is a fascinating essay in this month's PMLA by Timothy Aubrey where he attempts to address just that question: Why has The Kite Runner had such a powerful affect on so many readers? I haven't finished reading the article yet, but so far I'm enjoying it. Clearly it's the plot and the enduring theme of redemption that so wows the novels' readers--not the elegant writing style or the flat characters...
Here's a link to the article abstract: http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.1.25
I read that article, and I am surrounded by Hosseini fans, but none of them seem to be able to articulate what's so great about his books other than that they're "poignant." So are Hallmark cards. I need more than that.
Thanks to you, Salman Rushdie is my favorite author. I really don't think I'll ever be able to repay you for introducing me to his work.
Yes!!! What you said! (and some friendly exclamation points to go along with that).
I felt like there were too many Rushdie-esque moments in TKR that fell way short, but could never, of course, analyze the two authors the razor sharp way you have here.
I think what is so incredible about The Kite Runner is that it is written in a simple, yet beautifully moving way which successfully captures the betrayal. I have not read any of Rushdie's works and will begin doing so immediately for it seems an important point has been raised by this forum. But what I do want to say is that one must remember that the story is incredibly powerful and I think the reason why it has done so well internationally is because the average person is able to connect with the themes and characters in a way in which some of Rushdie's work cannot. A number of years ago I attempted to read Midnight's Children but was overwhelmed with the sense of figurative language and could not convey what was being said. I may have not been ready to read the book but I do feel that Rushdie employ's quite a high level of English that the average person may indeed grapple with. Perhaps this is why The Kite Runner has been so successful - because it situates itself in the hearts and minds of the general populace and not academics or highly literate individuals.
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