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And just because.
Jul. 11th, 2008 04:13 pmI read A Thousand Splendid Suns a month or so ago, and while it was well-written, and poignant, and certainly moving, I felt it was a little flat in character development.
Last night I stayed up and read The Kite Runner, Hosseini's first novel, and I'm still searching my room for the bits of my heart to put them back in place.
I think the difference between the two, what made one a good novel and one a great novel (in my opinion only, of course) is the difficulty in writing a truly intimate first-person narrative in the voice of a gender not your own. Hosseini's narrative in The Kite Runner is intricate and full of the nuance of a boy raised in Afghan culture, things that really only a man from that culture could know - it's in the description of facial expressions, the speech patterns, the food, and the knowledge of class and privilege. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, he does a good job, but doesn't make the internal narrative of the main character truly real.
Last night I stayed up and read The Kite Runner, Hosseini's first novel, and I'm still searching my room for the bits of my heart to put them back in place.
I think the difference between the two, what made one a good novel and one a great novel (in my opinion only, of course) is the difficulty in writing a truly intimate first-person narrative in the voice of a gender not your own. Hosseini's narrative in The Kite Runner is intricate and full of the nuance of a boy raised in Afghan culture, things that really only a man from that culture could know - it's in the description of facial expressions, the speech patterns, the food, and the knowledge of class and privilege. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, he does a good job, but doesn't make the internal narrative of the main character truly real.
