Alice Zeniter – the _

[3006] Reading Shih-Li Kow’s The Sum of Our Follies and being transported to Kuala Kangsar

I am generally attracted to paragraphs describing places. These descriptors make me feels a little bit like taking a vacation mentally.

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is primarily about the Spanish Civil War, but its pages are filled with place descriptors that I now would like to visit. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is set in Paris during the inter bellum period and that gives me an idea how the city looked like long ago, which I could compare to my own experience of visiting the city when I was younger.

I love Kaouther Adimi’s A Bookshop in Algiers and Alice Zeniter’s The Art of Losing incredibly for their depiction of Algiers specifically, and Algeria more generally. It has been some time since I have finished reading The Art of Losing, but a scene from the book where Algiers is observed by the protagonist from the sea still lingers in my head. I have never been to Algiers but that is now my primary idea of the city: a city of whitewashed buildings with a casbah on top of a hill, unmissable from the Mediterranean.

I think that (the feeling of taking a vacation) is the reason I enjoyed reading Shih-Li Kow’s The Sum of Our Follies. When the place Lubok Sayong first came up in the novel, I immediately searched for it online and on the map. Nothing came up, which immediately told me it is a fictional place.

Yet, some aspects of the place feel familiar. It could have been just the village of Sayong, across the Perak River from Kuala Kangsar. The suspicion only grew stronger as I went deeper into the story, which pulls in events of the 2000s into its narrative: the character YB Datuk Seri Minister most definitely satirizes Rafidah Aziz, who was a long-time Member of Parliament for Kuala Kangsar. The Sum of Our Follies was first published in 2014.

Kuala Kangsar itself plays a central role in setting the story’s background. Having lived in the town for a few years as a teenager and having visited the place several times after although not recently, the story’s progression sometimes was accompanied by vivid images in my head. It was almost as if the characters were living in a set projected out of my memory of the place. The vividness is almost as if I was watching TV.

Or it was as if I was there observing the characters personally. Away, somewhere, in Kuala Kangsar.

[2943] From Afghanistan to Algeria

These days, I generally prefer reading non-fiction to expand my knowledge. So far, it has been mostly history, mixed with a little bit of politics and economics. And it has been Malaysiana-heavy. So, I thought I needed a break from this and picked up some fictions for a change.

I recently finished reading two of them. One was The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, which is set in Algeria and France. The other is Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States. Both have the protagonists having lost their country to armed conflicts, and ended up as refugees in foreign but adopted lands.

I enjoyed them. And I thought I learned a little bit about Algeria and Afghanistan.

After completing almost every chapter, I found myself consulting Google Map and Wikipedia trying to comprehend the context sets by the both authors in their respective work. In The Art of Losing, I was attracted to paragraphs of Hamid the little boy remembering Algeria as Algiers, the white city on the coast of the Mediterranean despite only passing by the capital and having not living there, ever. He and his family were fleeing the country, and hectically catching a boat in order to cross the sea to get to France. That was the last time he saw Algeria.

Zeniter’s description of Algiers made me curious. A white city by the Mediterranean. That made me read more about it and searched for pictures of the city from the sea. On Google Map with its 3D feature, Algiers looks as described: a city of layers of white 3-4-5 storey buildings lining up the Algerian coast. And I did not realize the northern part of Algeria was quite green. When I thought of northern Africa, I could only think of mountains and deserts. I had extrapolated wrongly.

There is a scene in The Kite Runner where Hassan and his father were escaping Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. They were smuggled out of the country in a truck through the famed Khyber Pass. They needed to reach Peshawar in Pakistan that lies on the eastern end of the pass. I watched a couple of Youtube videos to understand the geography of the pass and comprehend the difficulty of the journey.

I have never been to either country, although I think I have flown above Afghanistan before en route to Europe several times. From what I could make from high up in the sky, the Afghan terrain is absolutely rugged.

But between Algeria and Afghanistan, I know the latter more. I was in the United States when the September 11 Attacks occurred, and Afghanistan was a constant feature in American politics for much of my time in Michigan. The Kite Runner makes reference to the US invasion and occupation of the country. More than that, the characters in the Kite Runners celebrated the fall of the Taliban:

That December, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras gathered in Bonn and, under the watchful eye of the UN, began the process that might someday end over twenty years of unhappiness in their watan. [Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner. Page 316. 2004]

People have been telling me The Kite Runner is an emotional book. Some cried. I did not, but I felt some sadness upon reading the sentence above, knowing the Taliban has returned, twenty years later. I personally feel the US leaving Afghanistan is a mistake. But never mind.

Algeria is more of a mystery to me. I know where it is located: sandwiched between Tunisia and Morocco. know the capital, and I know it is a Muslim country. I recognize its national flag. I may know a little bit about general classical history involving the Romans. But little else. Ask me about modern Algerian history and I will draw a blank. I have an Algerian French friend that I have not met for a long time, but I was not about to bombard her with questions. So, I read additional material online about modern Algeria, about the FLN that fought for Algerian independence and other relevant topics.

I have a copy of Tournament of Shadows by Karl Ernest Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac sitting on my book shelf. The book would tell me about Afghanistan much more than The Kite Runner could. But the non-fiction is 700-page long, and has been left unread and untouched for more than 5 years. Moreover, I do have a long list of other books I want to read. So, until the day I start reading that thick book, The Kite Runner (and The Art of Losing) will do.

Are the two poor substitutes to non-fiction as far as learning goes? Maybe, but I enjoyed them thoroughly.