Some months ago, I reported on Hosseini's very popular novel of Afghanistan, The Kite Runner. I thought it was a must-read-bad-book, that is, a book that is so informative and interesting that we should overlook its inferior construction and prose. I've now read another Afghan-American story and I have come to much the same opinion. Tamin Ansary's West of Kabul, East of New York (FSG, 2002) is swift and likable and necessary, but oh so very disappointing. Ansary is an author of children's books, and, perhaps out of habit his prose is so guileless that it seems aimed not at adults but at a junior high school audience.
Ansary's is the familiar story of an immigrant (this time half Afghani, half Finnish-American) stranded between two cultures. His transformation may be a little harder than most because Islam can be an inflexible integument. It's sad to read that Ansary's brother has become a fanatical fundamentalist who has embraced some contrary-to-reason, contrary-to-the facts-of-history dogmas. It's even more discouraging to read of Ansary's encounter with an Egyptian cab-driver in New York City, who says, "Thank God for the Taliban. I hate America. The sluts.The booze. The filth. In Egypt, I am a lawyer. I can't earn enough to support my family, so I come here for six months a year. But I never bring my wife. I don't want her to get polluted. One of my friends brought his wife here, and you know what she said to him. 'Don't touch me anymore.' You know what I would do to my wife if she ever said that to me. I would take her to the country, I would dig a hole, I would put her in that hole...." Ansary is a responsible and rational being and of course he's appalled and I think embarrassed by the hatred and misogyny that he encounters in that cab. Let us hope that it's not the angry cabbies but the Ansarys who will prevail -- in Islam as well as in closer-to-home religions.
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