[A Thousand Splendid Suns] and [Grapes of Wrath]

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[A Thousand Splendid Suns] and [Grapes of Wrath]

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1booksbooks11
Modifié : Nov 16, 2007, 6:11 pm

Both A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini and Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck seek to bring the personal story behind a large scale human tragedy. Both seek to inform us about the real impact of those tragedies on the people involved and so raise our awareness and form our opinions to follow those of the author. The Grapes of Wrath deals with the depression years in American and the tragedy of many thousands of people forced from their land to follow jobs in the west coast of California. In A Thousand Splendid Suns we see the war torn Afganistan and the invention of various foreign forces, the Taliban and life of the women they repressed.
I think both books do as they intend; you couldn't reach the end of either of them without strongly sympathising with the protaginsts, feeling angry at the injustice and somewhat helpless, wondering how you can stop this kind of suffering.
However, where Steinbeck really brings depth to his work is his full portrayal of both sides of the tragedy. We can feel for the man driving the tractor to demolish the Joad's farm, just trying to earn $2 a week to feed his family. You can feel for the townspeople terrified by the arrival of the "Oakies" who will steal their jobs and force them out on the road too. The only faceless all consuming badie is the banks, who Steinbeck still explains by the motivations of the markets.
Hosseini, however, fails to show us the real human face of the enemy. Be it the abusive husband who we never really get to know beyond his attrocities or the young men joining the hijad, looking for a way to right the wrongs they see around them. The sympathetic characters, all women, are expertly portrayed as blameless victims. We can barely stand to read of the suffering they must bear and thank the writer for some blessed relief from it at the end of the book.
Steinbeck's work stands the test of time and lives on as a masterpeice, as relevant today as ever. Hosseini's work is an engaging read and insightful view of the life of women under Islamic regeims, but it doesn't reach the masterful heights of Steinbeck.

2margad
Modifié : Nov 17, 2007, 9:11 pm

I love these unlikely comparisons of books that seem so different at first glance, but turn out to be so similar once you scratch the surface.

You make a good point about the divide between the sympathetic and unsympathetic characters in A Thousand Splendid Suns. I'm not sure the divide is quite as stark as you suggest, though. Mariam, the main protagonist, does behave quite harshly toward another innocent woman. (I'm avoiding spoilers here, but I think anyone who has read the book will know the situation I mean.) And even while we despise Mariam's husband for his brutality, we do gain some understanding of his motivations and the ugly forces that have shaped his character. He is less interesting than a more multi-faceted character would be, though.

I have to agree that The Grapes of Wrath is a masterpiece that A Thousand Splendid Suns doesn't match. Steinbeck seems to have had a more intimate understanding of the people and events he wrote about, whereas Hosseini's characters lean a little more toward melodrama. Part of the problem is certainly the entrenched brutality of life in Afghanistan during the period he writes about, while the American Depression era, even with all its suffering was less pervasively violent. Steinbeck chose to feature a loving family as his protagonists, though of course there are families in the U.S. that are as dysfunctional in their own way as the family in ATSS.

An interesting novel to read alongside A Thousand Splendid Suns might be Yasmina Khadra's The Swallows of Kabul. The couple at the center of this novel is loving, but their relationship becomes distorted by the Taliban's hatred and repression of women. An American reader would likely find an extreme quality in the events of the novel that can seem melodramatic, but which probably reflects the reality of life under the Taliban.