The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul

I'm back in Afghanistan again, after my last visit with Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. A country where life is so complicated, difficult and downright dangerous at times, surely cannot fail to produce compelling subject matter.

   
The tag-line on the front cover is "One little cafe. Five extraordinary women..." which is exactly what the story is about. The main characters and their entourage make occasional forays into Kabul's shopping districts, or rural Afghanistan, but usually the action comes to them in the coffee shop. As with Hosseini's book, the plight of Afghanistan's women is a central theme, but we are also given a glimpse into the traditional Afghan male mindset.

The Taliban are a shadowy presence in the background, but most of the plot lines concern either ex-pats working for the armed forces, journalists and civilians working for NGOs, or Afghans themselves and their traditional family values. These, of course, are completely alien to the West's liberal values, and Deborah Rodriguez does a good job of making the reader acutely aware of the vast cultural divide.

My impression was that this novel was accomplished "Chick-Lit", and a kind of "Hosseini-Lite". Whilst I can see men enjoying the latter's novels as much as women, I feel that male readers would find the sensibilities in Rodriguez' novel too cloying and female. I tried to work out what exactly makes Hosseini's writing rise above hers, and all I can say is that Deborah Rodriguez has written a really entertaining book, "as if Maeve Binchy had written The Kite Runner." (Kirkus Reviews) Khaled Hosseini's writing, on the other hand, touches the reader in a much deeper way. There is something noble and visceral about his writing that goes straight to the soul.

If you want a really entertaining, romantic holiday read, with a colourful cast of characters, you can't go wrong with this book.  It also has some great Book Group discussion ideas at the back, including Afghan recipes to share.

I think her own story would be just as good a read.  She set up a beauty school in a war zone, ran a coffee shop in Kabul, married an Afghan Muslim man, later discovering that she was his second wife, and eventually had to flee Kabul with her young son, when their lives were threatened.

She leaves the reader with an appreciation of Afghan culture and tradition, and a respect for its people.  If there is nobility to be found in this book, then it is in the Afghan people themselves, who endure so much.  Not the drug lords or the Taliban Commanders, but the little people in their daily struggle to survive, and to have as normal a life as possible under the circumstances they find themselves in.

Midnight's Children

Did you know that Salman Rushdie was toying with the idea of calling his novel " Children of Midnight"? However, as a seasoned Ad man, he eventually came down on the side of the title with the best ring to it, and the rest is history.

A history book is partly what Midnight's Children is, although like no other history book you will have ever read. It is strange that so many of the people that I have spoken to about this book, have also remarked that they too have never read it, but don't really know why that should be. I picked it up with trepidation, but by page forty-four was completely seduced by the narrator's voice, and enjoying the caustic humour, and its particular Indian flavour.

Rushdie's narrator, one Saleem Sinai, born on August 15th 1947 on the stroke of midnight, at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, declares at the outset that he has been "mysteriously handcuffed to history." He then proceeds to intertwine the history of his own family, starting with his maternal grandfather in Kashmir in 1915 with the birth pangs and subsequent tribulations of the new nations of India and Pakistan.
By day,  Saleem works in a pickle factory. By night he is driven to committing to paper the story of his life; paper that has taken on the unmistakeable whiff of chutney! The two are closely linked, both being a means of preserving: "Memory as well as fruit is being preserved from the corruption of clocks."

Nehru writes to the newborn: "We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention;it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own." I too tried valiantly to watch over his life, but literally lost the plot.  By the time I was half-way through, I had ceased caring, although I skim read the last quarter, which upset me greatly. I really don't like to admit defeat, but Midnight's Children was too much for me. It was a completely over-stuffed naan bread of a book, intent on showcasing the author's genius, at the expense of this reader's patience! I didn't feel that I had the background knowledge of Indian and Pakistani culture,folklore, history and religion to get a true grasp on the subject matter.

Yes, it's a brilliant tour de force, and bitingly funny and inventive, but maybe Magic Realism is just not for me. I felt quite down about being beaten into submission by a book, but was somewhat heartened to discover, during a conversation with friends on a train last week, that two of them had also thrown in the towel on a previous outing with Rushdie's novel. They were now regretting the decision of their book group to choose Midnight's Children as their next subject for discussion. They have a month to read it, and boy are they going to need it!

I may have found the novel indigestible, but I still like chutney.