The Dressmaker of Khair Khana
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Harper Collins, 2011. 170pp
ISBN: 978-0-06-173237-9
This book is an account of life in a suburb of Kabul in Afghanistan during the Taliban era of 1996 – 2001. It was written using extensive interviews with one family gthat felt it essential to break up during this fundamentalist period. The mother and father migrated to northern Afghanistan to live in an area their families came from. One son went to Pakistan and a son-in-law went to Iran. There the sons were able to make livings for themselves. They left behind two younger sons and five daughters and a married daughter. The family home was in Khair Khana, a suburb of Kazbul.
Much of the first half of the book is taken up with an account of how women were treated or mistreated by the Taliban. This is paralleled almost exactly by a similar, earlier account in Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul (2003). In the earlier book the author actually lived with the family she was studying for a period of about 6 months. She experienced their life problems and offered a very sympathetic account of the women’s lives. She also described how the father ran a bookshop that on the surface only sold religious literature but, dangerously, sold ‘illegal’ books under the counter. The bookseller was very unhappy with his portrait as a domestic tyrant in this book.
The family described in this book seems not to have been so strictly regulated by the father. His daughters were educated and encouraged to go to university. Indeed. When the Taliban took power, one already had a degree and a job and a second daughter had just completed part of her studies. Then, in 1996, their lives stopped. When outside the house they had to be completely covered and also be accompanied by a male member of the family.
The father and mother fled to the relative safety of northern Afghanistan and two of the sons fled to other Islamic countries. The daughters were thus left to fend for themselves.
After a time money, and hence food, became so short that the eldest daughter decided to learn how to sew from her oldest, married, sister. She sold what she made to traders in the local market. As demand for her clothes grew so she taught her sisters how to sew and thus increase output. Then friends got drawn in to the clothes production. Finally, she established a small school where girls were taught essential skills in order to help, what can only be described as a factory producing women’s clothes, meet its targets. The only reason the Taliban didn’t close them down and punish the women was that senior members had bought wedding clothes here for their own daughters.
When you read The Bookseller of Kabul you feel as though you are a member of the family, sharing their trials and tribulations. The same cannot really be said of this book which seems to be based on interviews rather than an extended period of living with the family. Nevertheless it does provide a useful counterbalance to the usual picture of helpless women under the Taliban. For this alone, it can be recommended.
A Compendium of Kisses
Lana Citron
Harlequin, 7 Oct 2010, iv + 219
ISBN: 978-0-373-89242-6
Most houses have at least one reference book in it – a dictionary – even if it is just a minute pocket one that obsolete secretaries and typists used to carry in their handbags or baskets to quietly check their boss’s spelling. It went with the job. But there are so many different types of dictionaries. I, for one, have straight English dictionaries ranging from a wonderful late 19th century two-volume one that defines a velocipede but not a bicycle, right the way up to the 1979 Compact Oxford English Dictionary that has to be read with a magnifying glass (provided). And more recent dictionaries that include larger or smaller sections devoted to a Thesaurus.
However, dictionaries cover a multitude of subjects: Quotations, Music, Opera, History, Art and Artists, Literature, Archaeology, Biography (as in the Dictionary of National Biography) and more technical subjects such as those used by crossword solvers or Scrabble players. Poets, of course, have recourse to several Rhyming Dictionaries. My bias towards the humanities shows clearly here. I am sure there are scientific dictionaries, but I have never had cause to try and find any of them.
The point is that whatever our interests we all need a reference work at some point or other in our lives. Some people will never turn a reference page once they have left school. Others will be forever buried in the never-ending possibilities that these books offer.
I think A Compendium of Kisses should be classified as a work of reference. In its 219 pages it provides a seemingly endless collection of quotations about, and commentaries on, kissing. It is divided into four sections: The Anatomy of a Kiss; The Nature and Geography of a Kiss; The History of Kissing; and Cultural Kisses. These cover every aspect of kissing that you could imagine and many that you never thought were possible. This book is fascinating to dip into and wander in the pages from time to time, a true reference book. Fortunately, it is not as long as Martin Von Kemp’s Opus Historicum de Osculis (roughly translated as a History of Kissing). It was published in Frankfurt in 1680 and consisted of over 1,000 pages of excerpts to form an encyclopaedic work on the subject. This is an entertaining and informative book.
On the fiction front, I've had a pretty good month. I started with Scarlett Thomas's Dead Clever and followed it up with Philippa Gregory's historical fiction The Red Queen. And then, Sebastian Faulks's Engleby. I'm afraid to say that, even though I normally enjoy reading his work, Gabrial Garcia Marquez's Leaf Storm failed to catch me. However, Robert Robinson's Naked Frame, a brilliant murder-mystery made up for that.
Naked Frame
Robert Burton Robinson
2010. 125pp
The first in a series of Rebecca Ranghorn novels.
This is a clever murder-mystery filled with murdered bodies. It’s very definitely goodies versus baddies, greedy versus magnanimous, poor versus rich. At the centre of the plot is a greedy second wife who is much younger than her wealthy businessman husband who has his finger in many profitable pies. The story starts with Rebecca Ranghorn, a private investigator, who is surprised by a man who is shot with her own revolver while talking to her in her office (It’s complicated!).
She flees and spends the rest of the novel with her friend Gaby, a clothes designer, keeping a very low profile while solving this and a further sequence of murders, each of which leaves clues pointing to her and Gaby as the culprits. Their first escape is from Gaby’s shop which is set on fire by people they believe are chasing them for the first killing.
In the course of their adventures we are introduced to a prostitute, a man who is a mechanical whizz but will only repair and rebuild classic American cars and a female scientist researching an advanced TENS machine.
As part of the search for the truth Rebecca decided to work as a waitress in a restaurant because several clues point to thee people running it. The waitresses serve food and drink wearing very high heels and a thong and nothing else. Customers are allowed to look but not touch except when putting tips into the front of the thong.
As you would expect, however, everything turns out right in the end and the guilty party is revealed through the restaurant owner’s extensive use of CCTV in every property and business he owns. But it’s not the person you expect from everything that has gone before!
This is a clever, well-written and eminently readable novel. The only pity is that it is so short.
I've read two superb poetry collections this month. Elaine Feinstein's Daylight and Sandy Pool's Exploding into Night.
Exploding into Night
Sandy Pool
First Poets series: 6
Series editor: Elana Wolff
Guernica Editions Inc, Canada. 2009, vi + 49 pp
ISBN: 978-1-55071-307-7
Sometimes a collection of poems stands head and shoulders above the rest. This is one of them. While the 48 prose poems are usually short, they hold your attention from first word to the last. You feel the need to read the collection again as soon as you have finished the last word, imply because of its virtuosity.
It tells the tale of a love story, a marriage, set beside a lake, a power plant and a settlement of sorts. It is not until the 24th poem that you learn that the ‘I’ of the sequence is a woman with ‘a blighted ovum’ and thus that the ’you’ must be a male. Up to that point the poems lead you to understand that the couple not only enjoy making love but are married. But from about then onwards the reader is led to the questions the woman has about her husband. Dirty fingernails suggest he has been with other women. She imagines him loving other women. In the end they separate – perhaps only into separate rooms in the house. Other people still believe them to be happy. But:
‘The marriage didn’t end. It simply dissolved
As soap in water. I left you sadly ….’
She can’t pretend she never loved him because every time she sees him she ‘falls to pieces’. She yearns for him.
But then between poems 34 and 41 we learn that he murdered her, kept her body for three days and then threw her into the lake.
‘In the meantime, I had become beautiful. I
Had grown scales and a black, liquid eye. You
Couldn’t see past it, or didn’t want to …’
He has nightmares about carcases. And then he catches a fish with a hook through the lip – and it is her.
This is a collection of poems that grows with every reading. You will never regret buying it.
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