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.