The book is A Thousand Splendid Suns, the highly anticipated second novel by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner. The story is of two Afghani women, elder and younger wives of an abusive husband, who become family to one another in a hopelessly war-torn country.
in stories, things tend to work out. even if there's no neat, happy ending, you can pretty much bet that problems that are brought up are going to be addressed, if not solved. if you learn a character's name, chances are he's going to be a cog in the machine leading towards the climax, the denouement, and the end of the book. the phrase "she finds [love, help, danger, etc] in the most unexpected place" is thrown about a lot on dust jackets, but, in reality, if there are details in a book that don't turn out to be some sort of foreshadowing, the prose often seems a bit messy.
maybe it's the curse of an avid and early reader, but it sometimes gives me pause to realize that that's not even remotely true in life. if daily life were a series of short plays, each one would have a huge dramatis personae, and it's often hard to predict when a character is exeunt-ing for the day to return several years later or tomorrow or never. at any point a complete stranger can be the Big Difference.
the other day, a girl i hadn't really thought about since middle school came into my Borders and changed my mindset for the rest of the day with our short interaction. the weird thing is that it wasn't that weird... this is Long Beach, after all. who knows how many lives i've changes by interactions i didn't even know were happening? and how different my own life would have been if i hadn't, senior year of high school, accepted a ride home a then-auxiliary player, a friend-of-a-friend who, in two months, will be my husband?
in a cliché sort of way, it's chaos theory. it's also a staple of buddhist philosophy: everything's interconnected, and the course of that system of "cause and effect" can only be predicted by very naive junior monks who are then to be whapped on the back of the neck into enlightenment. handing a mud pie to a man who will, lifetimes later, be the Buddha changes the course of history. and those things that seem so ever so important can just as easily fall by the wayside. who can tell?
and my point? i dunno, i guess it's that, no matter how much you hate them, you shouldn't wish for the eradication of all bees in the world. Mike.
$25.95
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3 comments:
so let's say all things are interconnected, as you say. i've always thought that theory kind of paints the universe as an almost biological organism, in an interesting way. if there were something in all that connectedness that were made of PURE EVIL, wouldn't that be like a cancer, negatively affecting the ENTIRE WORLD (!!!!!) with its existence? The answer is yes. Down with the bees. And the wasps. The wasps, also.
Blarg!
I want to know who this girl from middle school was!! And how did she change your day?
And how is 1000 Splendid Suns?
I only recently read the Kite Runner...I'm slightly behind in pop culture.
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