Since I finished The Other Boleyn Girl on the way to Dresden, I needed to pick up another book in the Frankfurt airport for the return flight. I chose The Zahir, by Paulo Coelho. I had liked (but not loved) The Alchemist, and The Zahir struck me in much the same way: both are about the quest for enlightenment and spirituality, and both are somewhat heavy handed. The Zahir at least has a more interesting plot. The narrator's wife, Esther, has disappeared and he spends the next few years searching for her, his obsession, his "Zahir." In the meantime, his lover Marie supports him unselfishly as he searches. In fact, she's the only unselfish character in the book. Assisting him in his search is Mikhail, an expatriate from Kazakhstan and possibly Esther's lover, who travels about giving interactive performances about love. It's all very deep and spiritual, but not really compelling, at least not for me.

Once I finished The Zahir, I could move on to one of the books in my stack that I've been looking forward to reading. My sister, Julie, had loaned me her copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, who also wrote The Kite Runner, which I loved. Both of Hosseini's books take place in Afghanistan and as such, provide a glimpse into a very different world. In combination with The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart, which I read for my bookclub but apparently never wrote about on this blog, these books are starting to make Afghanistan a little more familiar, if not more understandable. What Suns does that the others don't is provide a picture of women's lives in Afghanistan, which are very different from the lives of men.

I really admire the way Hosseini weaves the political struggles in Afghanistan with the heart-wrenching tale of two women, but I found A Thousand Splendid Suns to be unrelentingly grim until the last 35 pages or so when it suddenly becomes a love story. I guess you can't criticize a writer for writing something unrelentingly grim about an unrelenting and grim war, but it made difficult reading for me. As for the male/female and other relationship issues that he tackles, I was less surprised by the fact that women have no rights and no protection in Afghanistan (at least under the Soviets, the Taliban, or the Mujahideen) than by the way the wealthy Jalil treats his illegitimate daughter Mariam: he alternately loves and cares for her and casts her out to endure a horrific life. I guess what I found so surprising was the kindness he (at times) showed to her. Even his other three legitimate wives take her in, although eventually they seem to the culprits in his rejection of her. The rehabilitation of the Jalil character at the end of the book also did not ring true to me, but given that the Afghani culture is unknown and perhaps unknowable, perhaps this is as realistic as any story can be.