DOES THE SUN SHINE?

Pages: 367
Price: US$18
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Year: May 2007

Parallel lives. One in a kolba, a rambling little shack in the fictional Afghan village of Gul Daman, another in capital Kabul. Love, friendship, betrayal and boys. Khaled Hosseini told us that tale in The Kite Runner.

This time he returns to his familiar setting, albeit with very different characters. It is a study of the human condition, of resilience, of love when all is lost and it is told through Mariam and Laila. Two women from two entirely different worlds. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy cinema owner in Herat. It's a fact her mother never lets her forget. She is told the day she walks out of the kolba, her heart-broken mother will be dead. Rules are meant to be broken, Mariam does it in search of perfect paternal love. When she gets a disappointing taste of the real world, her mother is dead and life as she has known it ends for Mariam. She barely has time to come to grips with what's happening around her. Before she knows it, her father's family has got rid of her by hurriedly marrying her off to the much older and widowed Rasheed and packed her off to Kabul.

Mariam sees her world fall apart several times. The day she realises, her father wouldn't own her, the day she loses her mother, the day she becomes pregnant and loses her child. The cycle of loss keeps repeating itself when she knows she can never be a mother again. By the time the war is upon them, Rasheed has lost all interest in her and Mariam's spirit has been fully crushed. Till Laila arrives.

Unlike Mariam, Laila is a legitimate child. Babi, her father has insisted on giving her an education and she hasn't disappointed:
I know you're still young, but I want you to understand and learn this now, he said. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very, very bright girl. Truly, you are. You can be anything you want, Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over, Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men, maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.

So Babi believed before the war transformed the entire landscape. Laila lost her brothers, her mother lost her sanity and when they eventually decided to pack their bags and leave for Pakistan where she hopes to reunite with the love of her life - Tariq, it's all a little too late. A bomb shatters their house, her parents are killed instantly and a badly injured Laila is pulled out of the rubble of her home by Rasheed.

With that, the various strings that bind this novel so adeptly come together. I like the way Hosseini keeps you guessing, the way he gets into the skin of his characters to capture every little nuance. One of the lines that's stayed in my head is the one which shows Laila and Mariam accepting their fate and bringing themselves to terms with being Rasheed's wives.

An unguarded unknowing look. And in this fleeting, wordless exchange with Mariam, Laila knew that they were not enemies any longer.

With that the novel takes on a whole new spin. Once the enmity is forgotten, new truths are discovered. On the one hand, Hosseini captures their lives in the house and in another broad sweep you get glimpses of an Afghanistan rapidly falling apart.

Spanning from the 1970s to 2003, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is a window to Afghanistan starting with the good years, the Soviet occupation, to the rise of the Taliban and eventually into its conversion into a war zone. It's a tough job and for that one couldn't have asked for a better narrator than Hosseini.

To some the novel may sound overly sentimental, but when a war transforms a human landscape, there are bound to be tears. Hosseini knows that.

FRUITY PICK

Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka
Pages 310
April 2007
Publisher Fig Tree - A Penguin Books Imprint

It's a bad idea to read reviews of books before actually reading them. I'd read two. Both not entirely flattering. The Economist pared it down to the part about the chickens. And I do take the magazine's or should it be newspaper's word seriously.

So I left Marina Lewycka's second book Two Caravans on my book shelf for the longest time.

The only reason it ended in my bag was thanks to a rather unplanned vacation and because everything else on the shelf at that moment looked way too serious. There were promises of a strawberry field - what better way to sit back and relax? Add to that the idyll of the English countryside, beautiful summer days, fields far far away and caravans of course.

Oh, I could definitely survive this, even if I didn't end up loving it. But love it was the minute I was introduced to Irina, hot off the coach from Kiev straight into the hands of the sinister Mister Vulk:

"Life in vest is too much expensive, little flovver. Who do you think vill be pay for all such luxury?

Although his English was appalling , those words came rolling out like a prepared speech. 'You think this vill be providing all for free?'

So Mother had been right. 'Anybody can see this agency is run by crooks. Anybody but you, Irina.' (See how Mother has this annoying habit of putting me down?)"

With that Irina tries to convince herself that her plans of improving her English and finding true love with a romantic Englishman will bear fruit. Never mind that Vulk has ensured 'little flovver' is stripped of her passport.

Here comes Andriy Palenko, the miner's son from the other Ukraine, who acknowledges her nice features but also her attitude:

"She thinks she's a high-culture type with a superior mentality, and you're a low culture type. (And so what if you are? Is that something to be ashamed of?)"

I love the way Lewycka gets into the skin of her characters to bring alive the Bob Dylan fan - Tomasz, Yola the uncrowned strawberry plucking chief, the two Chinese girls, Emanuel from Malawi who has made the journey in search of his sister. The stories of these characters and several more take you to different lands without the intricate weave of the story losing its appeal.

Song Ying's journey begins in Guangdong where her dreams began and ended. Soo Lai Bee is the victim of a broken heart and has to flee Malaysia.

They all come together to share stories of their lives, their dreams - some shattered, some still there, they watch the sun rise and set as they pick strawberries together.

Life isn't all that rosy, there is more to the world revolving around the strawberry fields. Gang masters, exploitative employers, government regulations, life and love -all of these threads somehow weave themselves together through Lewycka's deft pen.

Long after I was through with the last page, Irina's words came back to me:
".....In the silence, I started to feel the closeness of all the other people who had stood and lain in this place over thousands of years, staring at these same rocks and this sky. I imagined I could hear their footsteps and their voices in my head, not hurrying or shouting, but just the gentle chatter-patter of human life, as it has been lived on this earth since time was first counted.

It reminded me of my childhood, when my bed had been in the living room of our little two-roomed flat, and each night I fell asleep to the sound of my parents' voices and their quiet movement tiptoeing around so as not to wake me - chatter-patter."

It may not have worked for the rest, but it certainly worked for me. I think comparisons are futile. Two Caravans stands on its own and holds its ground.

It won't be a word of mouth hit like the author's debut A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - too much ink has already been spilt on Two Caravans. But it will definitely be read by people across the world. At last count, Tractors has been translated into 29 languages and had won the 2005 Saga Award for Wit, the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction. It's a tough act to follow, though Lewycka is definitely up to it.

No surprise that the 61 year old Ukranian has been tipped to be a "literary lion of the future," according to this report in The Times.

Well, she may be a bestselling author now, but her literary journey started with a rejection slip. Yes, we live in times of hope.

A LABOUR OF LOVE

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
Publisher : Headline
Pages : 369
Published : May 2007
Genre : Fiction

An unnamed protagonist, Iran in the 1620s, the art of knotting carpets, transition of a young girl's life as she journeys from the village to the city.

All of these combine to make Anita Amirrezvani's debut novel a stunning read. It follows the Iranian story telling tradition where the narrator is not given a name. The experience is a bit unsettling at first. After all, you want a name to associate with, but the story pulls you way beyond the fixation of naming the central character.

The author skilfully draws you into her character's life. Things seem perfect, then come undone when she loses her father. Survival means she and her mother have to give up the life they have known in the village. Left with no option, they move to exotic Isfahan.

It is a beautiful city, though living with the grudging charity of relatives makes things difficult. As do some of the friendships that are forged. The narrator's mother hopes marriage can change their fortunes:
"Marrying you is the only way we can hope to live on our own again,' said my mother. She turned away and fell asleep almost immediately. I wished there were a way to make her life sweeter."

Things get a tad sweeter when she is allowed to work on what she liked to do as a child. Knotting carpets. If you like the intricacies of the weaves that beautifully adorn floors and walls then this book will definitely work for you. Making carpets is a fine art - that much we all know. Before you can even get to the rendition though, there are colours, designs, patterns, wool and the materials. Apart from the skill needed for all of this is the need to delight the eye with patterns, to make them refreshing, they ensure they surprise the eye, yet don't overwhelm it.

I loved how Amirrezvani brought all of these elements together while talking about a life that often seemed like it would fall apart. Though just like any great book, when you think you've got a hang of the plot, there's the twist. The carpets, the foiled sale, the sigheh - which is a temporary marriage contract and the last resort for the protagonist - all combine to make 'The Blood of Flowers' a great page turner.

It saw me burn my midnight oil. No regrets though, it was well worth the panda eyes the next morning.

This book took nine long years to write and the labour of love clearly shows in the sparkling prose backed by the extensive research that went into its writing.