Baby Got Books

All About the Suns

Two of the last books that I read in 2007 were books that I had in the stack most of year. I had promised myself that they would not languish into 2008. It was crunch time, but both were removed from the pile by year’s end.

The first was Khaled Hosseini’s follow-up to The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns. The second was Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’ve decided to review the books together given the similarities between the two books – both were written by foreign born authors, both have sun imagery in the titles, both feature two women as the novels’ central characters, and both stories are set in war torn nations.

Many people loved The Kite Runner. I wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t that the book was bad, just that there were flaws in the book that I couldn’t get past. I thought Kite Runner was over-the-top melodramatic, conveniently overlooked women, and – worst of all – used an expository style to explain what foreign words meant in dialog spoken by people who ostensibly spoke the language. It drove me nuts. NUTS.

Fortunately Hosseini chose to address my concerns in 1000 Suns. The book tells the story of two Afghan women whose lives become intertwined through circumstance. The lives of the two women are not enviable, but the hardships they endure as Kabul is torn apart around them is believable. Hosseini doesn’t make it past Page 6 before he feels compelled to throw in dialog like this, “But he was a coward my father. He didn’t have the dil, the heart, for it.” Wouldn’t the smart ass response be, “Yes. I know dil means heart. We’re speaking the same language.” Mercifully, there’s much, much, less of this kind of thing in 1000 Suns than in Kite Runner.

Although I enjoyed the novel overall, I have a new beef with Hosseini’s novels. Both the Kite Runner and 1000 Suns take place in time frames that span from the pre-Taliban to the approximate present. Neither book does more than make cursory reference to the fact that American troops landed in the country and are still there. The Taliban were there, a miracle happened, and now they are gone and life continues. His characters all happen to be occupied somewhere else when Team America arrives. Surely the characters have some opinion on the subject – good or bad. It seems a bit of a cop out. Hopefully he will address this concern in his next novel.

Half of a Yellow Sun is set during Biafran War that took place in Nigeria between 1967 and 1970. I didn’t know much about the war before reading the novel, and I had assumed that post-colonial Nigeria was always a stable country. It was a little surreal to finish the book and then watch the situation in Kenya, another African country I always thought of as stable, blow up following their recent election.

The novel focuses primarily on two sisters as their country slowly slip into a civil war. The result of the civil war is the formation of a new country, Biafra. The sisters belonged to the Igbo ethnic group, which were the principle ethnic group of Biafra and had comprised the ruling elite of Nigeria before the war. Ultimately, the sisters were on the losing side in a war which saw losses of more than one million people on the Biafran side alone. It is the slow unraveling of of the sisters lives that provides the emotional weight of the story. And they don’t tell each other what basic words mean.

Half of a Yellow Sun was on many year-end best lists in 2006. It’s a powerful and well-written novel with well developed characters. And as Bill Cosby used to say at the beginning of Fat Albert, “…and if you’re not careful, you might learn something before it’s done.” You can’t ask for more than that.