READING AFGHANISTAN

Is Afghanistan the country so fascinating or does the stark landscape inspire great writing? I've been "reading Afghanistan" recently, and can't seem to get my fill.

It all started over thirty years ago when I was pregnant with my first child and in a dreamy mood. I picked up James Michener's Caravans and couldn't put it down until I finished. It was definitely a product of the 60s, as was I. Nothing coud be more enticing to me, or more exotic, than falling for some nomad [now called a warlord] on a camel caravan in Afghanistan. I identified completely with the main character, Ellen Jasper, and was right there with her traveling through the Hindu Kush.

The fascination with Afghanistan has stayed with me all these years, and world events, hideous as they are, have blessed me with the fruit of excellent writing on this region.

My recent Afghanistan reading started with The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It is one of the most moving stories I've ever read at any level -- the characters, the setting (Kabul, Afghanistan and Fremont, California), the story, and the times. The story is so filled with compassion it would have worked in any setting, but the protagonist's nonconventional Kabul family makes it all the more enticing. A young, motherless boy comes of age in a world of men, and a country that is crumbling at his feet. Within this context is his troubled relationship with (the reader is led to believe) the son of his father's servant, who is also his best boyhood friend. He witnesses an event regarding this friend, that marks his character for life.

Khaled Hosseini works days as a physician at Kaiser in the South San Francisco Bay Area. He writes from five to seven every morning. When I heard him speak, he seemed like any ordinary American guy -- clean cut, fair skinned, no accent. Yet he has lived through incredible times.

More recently I read West of Kabul, east of New York : an Afghan American story, a memoir by Mir Tamim Ansary. Mr. Ansary is also a Bay Area based writer who came to the United States from Afghanistan as a teen-ager. His mother was American and the first American woman living in Kabul in the 1940s. On September 12, 2001 he sent an impassioned email to about sixty friends describing is feelings about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent finger pointing. The email was forwarded ... and forwarded ... and forwarded until it reached millions around the world. Inspired by the interest in his email Mr. Ansary’s wrote this memoir of growing up in Afghanistan, and of being caught between two worlds. It is revealing in many ways, but it is unfortunate that he devoted so much time to his life as a hippie when he could have told us so much more about his life in Afghanistan.

Tamim Ansary is a writer of childrens books currently living in San Francisco.

The Bookseller in Kabul is Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad’s account of the six months she spent with the bookseller Sultan Khan and his extended family. Though biased toward women’s plight, it is nevertheless an insightful account of social interactions in a culture so foreign to Westerner’s. See Amazon.com reviews for the story behind the story.

Each of these authors uses a different literary format to put a human face on a culture Westerners hear so much about, and understand so little. Three families living in Kabul with backgrounds, passions and sensibilities as diverse as any three families living here in Oakland. Now I'm looking forward to The swallows of Kabul, by Yasmina Khadra.