I listened to this book on CD at work, and it was a difficult, moving experience. The author writes of his native Afghanistan with such deep affection and grace. I had read his previous work (The Kite Runner) and appreciated it, but this one hit me harder. Certainly this was due in great part to the female characters at the heart of this book; Mariam and Laila live very different lives, grow up in very different worlds in their country. Mariam is an illegitimate child, growing up in poverty with her troubled and resentful mother, and is married off at fifteen to an abusive husband. Laila lives a happy, middle-class life until the communists are driven from Kabul by the warlords, at which time her family is destroyed, her world crashes down around her and she is forced into Mariam's household as a second wife to Rasheed.
I'm not going to recap the plot; suffice it to say that the plight of these women cut me to the core and made me deeply, deeply grateful for my easy and happy life. I know that, all over the world there are women who suffer greatly in ways that I can't even imagine. It just seems like I'm coming across stories more often recently, or noticing them more, and being affected by them more... There was a piece in the City Pages about a documentary about the plight of women in Africa - I don't remember which country in Africa - who suffer terrible problems after childbirth; perianal fistulas and such. Augh, it makes me shudder just to think about it. And on public radio a piece about women in the Congo being raped, and the men having this horrendous, callous, lawless attitude of ownership and fatalistic acceptance. Not even fatalistic; they simply believe that it's OK to take sex when they want it, and for other men to take sex, even from the wives of others.
I'm disgressing. The book is so worth reading.
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