![]() ![]() ![]() He does attempt to bring some excitement to the story with dramatized violence, but that's hardly a replacement for a well-constructed plot. Every convenient coincidence that could happen, does happen. ![]() Hosseini's story is thickly foreshadowed and wraps up so neatly in the end that the reader will never have to worry about being surprised. Sadly, for all the daily news reports about Afghanistan, most people know very little of its history. Just like the spate of Native American pop fiction in the late eighties, this is overwhelmingly colonized literature, in that it pretends to reveal some aspect of the 'other' culture, but on closer inspection (aside from the occasional tidbit) it is a thoroughly western story, firmly ensconced in the western tradition.Įven those tidbits Hosseini gives are of such a vague degree that to be impressed by them, one would have to have almost no knowledge of the history of Afghanistan, nor the cultural conflicts raging there between the Shia and Sunni Muslims, or how it formed a surrogate battleground for Russia and the United States in the Cold War, or for Colonial conflicts in the centuries before. This is the sort of book White America reads to feel worldly. ![]()
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