Word: novelizations
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Vincent, the Nigerian narrator of Segun Afolabi's impressive new novel, Goodbye Lucille, has left London and his girlfriend for 1985 Berlin. Working as a photographer, he spends his free time there getting drunk with his friends: Clariss, a transsexual ex-marine turned escort girl; B, a Cameroonian working in removals; and Tunde, a Nigerian playboy who selects girlfriends largely on the basis of their breast size. They are all in exile of a kind. Ari, Vincent's Kurdish neighbor, has been driven to paranoia by the violence he has witnessed. His friend Ezmir kills himself after "an interview with...
...fascination with borders and belonging similarly permeate A Life Elsewhere, a superb collection of short stories published last year, which Afolabi had composed during breaks from writing the novel. One tale, Monday Morning, is about a family of asylum seekers fleeing atrocities at home for a new life in London; another is about a young man escaping to the U.S. from London; a third explores the feelings of repulsion and shame a man feels on a trip "home" to Nigeria. The stories are almost unremittingly dark. When the father in Monday Morning injures himself escaping immigration officials on a building...
...were going to write a novel about an expatriate Afghan returning to the land of his birth, the usual way to do it would be, first, return to Afghanistan, and then, second, write a novel about it. Khaled Hosseini did it backward. He wrote the runaway best-seller The Kite Runner first, about an Afghan living in California who returns home to redeem a moment of cowardice from his childhood. Only in 2003, when the book was already done, did Hosseini go back to Kabul, the city where he was born. He hadn't seen it in 27 years...
Hosseini can't change his good fortune, but he did come back from Afghanistan with a remarkable new novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead; 372 pages), about the lives of those who stayed behind. It is, in its own way, a kind of redemption...
When Hosseini went back to Kabul, the prosperous, cosmopolitan metropolis he remembered was gone, replaced by a polluted, impoverished, war-shattered city. "There's a line in my first novel where this guy says, 'I feel like a tourist in my own country,'" Hosseini says. "I felt the same way." He strolled around Kabul for weeks visiting relatives and talking to people he met in the street. "Some of the things I heard, I wouldn't have believed. This one guy told me he walked into a house one day and saw these three girls: one killed...