(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
While his older brother Anwar is an engineer working in Europe (Munich), Faruk lives close to the events that set Afghanistan on track back to the Middle Ages. The villain in this tragedy is on the great planet of the Soviet Union. In the story itself, the Soviet Union is represented by KGB captain Orlov, who is thin, blond and evil. Apparently, the Captain could have been taken from a James Bond movie, but Gjerseth is careful to emphasize that reality is more extreme than fiction – that the real Orlovas surpassed Hollywood's villains. Orlov leads the interrogations, which end with Faruk's teacher, Gulrahim, getting his eyes out. This is the event that drives the action – Chakoo is a story of revenge.
Distilled documentary
The story is intriguing enough, though Chakoo is more than "just" an exciting story. The plot is a framework that enables a comprehensive description of how Afghanistan is being destroyed by foreigners and their local henchmen, in front of the noses of cynical diplomats, while the Western world does not care. Chakoo is also a portrayal of the Afghan community from Kabul, to the mountains, to the villages of the valleys, to the refugee communities of Peshawar and to Afghan emigrants in Europe. The novel has a touch of the documentary's attempt to portray a society through the fate of an individual, but at the same time contains so many stories, views and people that one can call it a kind of distilled documentary. The dedication to the text is such that it does not tolerate the black spots found in journalists' reality: on a couple of occasions, the novel's narrator is a fly sitting on the wall where important meetings are held. With such baroque grips, the lowly game should be revealed once and for all.
Contingency Poetry
The best part Chakoo is perhaps just the commitment, which creates temperature and drive in the text. The book vile something. The first project is to take a deep look at the great European apathy and show what is really going on in the world:
Anwar falls asleep with memories of Europe. A continent without a head. A world where all meaningful life took place in the digestive organs. Even love was a kind of meal in which two soulless bodies began to chew on each other. Europe is far away. The Europeans have a lot in common with the occupiers – they never took the time to find out who the war was about. Automatically there was talk of the "poor Afghans". Here lie the poor Afghans and know that they are the only ones in the world who can liberate Kabul. Europeans should feel sorry for themselves. In the Federal Republic, any war is unreal until the bombs fall on Munich. That day, it's probably too late to be wise. Europe must start anew. Those who have a life to defend also know it in peacetime. Europeans do not understand what they have until the day they lose it. Then it is impossible to regret.
The European illusions of security and happiness are based on some key misconceptions. One of them is symbolic political commitment, as Anwar sees in one of the inn guests in Munich: "One of the German bastards who longs for a kind of justice and calls himself more radical to avoid understanding anything". Another pillar of the European quasi-society is the media:
this is a day with, among other things, two murders, a financial scandal and the story of a cat that fell a hundred meters and survived. The newspapers also write that Franz Josef Strauss has scolded Helmut Schmidt and vice versa. Somewhere in the newspaper he finds reports that the Soviet forces continue to advance in Afghanistan. "It is calm in Kabul," it said.
The second major project in Chakoo is to rebuild the Afghan. The people of Afghanistan are people of flesh and blood, not unspeakable victims of Soviet bombs and Western, condescending sympathy. In this regard, there are several stereotypes the book wants to bring to life. Islam, for example, is not synonymous with the darkest middle class (in itself a stereotype). In addition, many Afghans have a relaxed relationship with religion – without falling into secular ideologies such as Maoism. It is liberation that brings people together. Afghans are people who like to joke and flirt, the book can tell us. They are both erotic, justice-seeking and happy. In one word: people.
Checkbox, naughty box
At the same time, the narrative is flat in both linguistic and personal drawings, which often belongs to the genre of suspense, but involves some pitfalls. First, new heroic stereotypes emerge on the ruins of those the book is tearing down. Gjerseth is weak for mythologizing walking stories which, for example, are about the Afghan men's purposeful, merciless and patient revenge on a group of British colonial soldiers who had raped an Afghan woman. Secondly, in the descriptions and especially in the dialogues, the cuckoo-like language is a little strenuous in the long run. Hard-boiled realism is a linguistic convention that carries with it the danger of tipping over into the clichéd so that the realistic element disappears in the rush of quick, street-smart formulations. Maybe it's a matter of taste, though Chakoo was a book I liked, without feeling it.
News
Political poetry from the seventies is said very badly. Even though Chakoo may be seen as a literary representative for another time, there is no doubt that the book has survived the Cold War and is relevant today. There are two reasons for that. The novel is not decadent-ideological in its own right take on political events: the engagement does not stem from a dream of utopia, but from indignation over the killings of the Afghan villagers who did not escape the Russian helicopters. The perspective of the novel is the view from the ground. Unfortunately, it is also relevant because the actions it describes still take place, and then I think not primarily of Afghanistan, but of Chechnya, which is today's theater of European (Russian) imperialism at its most brutal, blind, deaf and counterproductive.
