Modest Man Wins Again

I'm still amazed that these books have become such a phenomenon ... It's almost a study in how not to write a bestseller. They're set in this far-flung, very enigmatic place with lots of tragedy. The good guys die. I'm completely surprised.

The very modest Khaled Hosseini is interviewed in The Times. His second novel A Thousand Splendid Suns has just won The Times/WHSmith Paperback of the Year.

The Poets of Guantánamo

The great thing about poetry is the way it gives a voice to the voiceless and disenfranchised, expresses the deepest of hurts, and helps to heal them.

A collection of poems written by the prisoners of Guantánamo prisoners' poems was launched in the UK a few days ago, the Guardian reports. (The US launch was in August.)

Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak brings together poems written by 17 of the detainees, collected American law professor Professor Marc Falkoff,who has represented them.

The poems were written with no expectation of an audience beyond the other inmates - some of them carved with pebbles on styrofoam cups, to be passed around and read, and then confiscated when the plates were collected.

Many of the featured poets were writing for the first time, although according to an article on SFGate.com Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost was already a respected religious scholar, poet, journalist and author of 19 published books before his arrest about a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. He recreated his "cup poems" from memory after his release in 2005.

His brother and former fellow Guantanamo inmate Badruzamman Badr said in an interview :

Poetry was our support and psychological uplift. Many people have lost their minds there. I know 40 or 50 prisoners who are mad. But we took refuge in our minds.

Dost is himself amazingly positive about his time in Guantánamo:

The positives have outweighed the negatives ... I was not unhappy for being detained because I learned a lot. I wrote from the core of my heart in Guantanamo Bay. In the outside world I could not have written such things.

So how good is the book? Megan O' Rourke writing for Slate.com says the book is distinctive for a number of reasons:

First, because it is a collection of writers, it drives home the plurality of experience and attitudes of those incarcerated, pushing back against the tendency to view them as interchangeable "enemy combatants." Second, because many of the authors are still being held in Guantanamo, it serves as testimony in an ongoing debate over the rights of foreign citizens who have been labeled dangers to the United States. Third, poetry proves to be an ideal way for these authors to convey the frustrations of imprisonment. The supple restrictions of the form lend intensity to their despair (or fury) at being imprisoned without habeas corpus on a remote island. ... What makes it interesting is not so much the literary virtues of the poems—some are quite artful, while others are less accomplished—as the way the poems restore individuality to those who have been dehumanized and vilified in the eyes of the public.

And US former poet laureate, Robert Pinsky assesses the collection at The World.org pointing out that it's greatest quality is its urgency.

You can listen to some of the poems on the University of Iowa website and find links to more reviews and discussion about the treatment of detainees.

Of course, if you care about the issue of detainment without trial in general terms, the Amnesty International website provides useful information. Because who knows, it could be coming to a country near you!

(Picture at right from the New York Times.)

Kite Runner Controversy

The filming of Khaled Hosseini's best selling novel The Kite Runner has run into controversy in Afghanistan where it is set, according to a report on the BBC website.

And if you've read the book, I'm sure you can guess which scene has caused the furor.

The novel has sold more than eight million copies worldwide. In the UK where it has sold more than a million copies, it's success is largely due to it's popularity among book clubs. It was voted the best book club read of the year for the second year running by members of the public and entrants of the 2007 Penguin/Orange Broadband Readers' Group prize according to the Times.

(The photo is from the BBC website and shows Ahmad Khan who plays Hassan.)

High as Kites

Ugggh! It can't be after 10 a.m. already, can it? I don't know what Sham put in the (delicious!) chocolate mousse last night, but I've only just crawled out of bed feeling like yesterday's left-overs reheated.

(This after two different people told me yesterday "I don't know how you get up so early to post on your blog, day after day"! Sorry to sully my unblemished record. )

Maybe it was brain-burn-out brought on by all the intellectual discussion generated by our reading group meeting last night when Fiction&Friends met to discuss our book of the month at Sham's house - The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

For those of you who don't know the book, it is the story of two motherless boys (Amir, the son of a wealthy buisness man in Kabul, and Hassan who is the son of their Hazara servant ) who grow up as inseperable friends. Then an act of violence, which Amir makes no attempt to stop, shatters the friendship. Amir's cowardice continues to haunts him, even after he has fled to America, married, and built a successful career as a writer. He is finally given the opportunity to confront the demons of his past in a perilous journey into war-torn Afganistan.

Extremely readable, the book got a firm thumbs up from everyone. Most had had an emotional journey through it, and used up plenty of tissues. (Though not cynical old me.) We loved the setting, which showed us prewar Kabul and gave us cultural insights into a country most of us know only from news bulletins.

(If you've enjoyed the book, you might like to read Khaled Hosseini's fascinating account of his real-life journey back to Kabul to find his father's house after the book was written, only to find how much art imitiates life.)

The dramatic "sin and redemption" theme, the almost stock-villain Aseef, and the obvious contrivance of the plot twists were explained neatly by my reading group buddies. "It's just like a Hindi movie," they all agreed, and being Bollywood fans loved the book even more for that.

Krishna provided the biggest laugh of the evening when he started talking about the events in "the third-half of the book" and couldn't see why we were all falling about. He should have been born blonde.