The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet – Review by Mark Cornelius
Lyse Doucet is a fantastic journalist, who is rightly held in high esteem for her reporting and her courage. But this should not colour our view of her book, as it really is not very good. It’s meant to be a history of modern Afghanistan told through the lens of the Kabul Inter-Continental Hotel. As a consequence, Doucet focuses on the characters who have worked in the hotel, rather than the politicians. The trouble is that she does not describe the hotel staff well enough to make them feel like real rounded characters. We are given sporadic glimpses into their hard lives over the course of the book. And because we don’t know them that well, we spend too long trying to remember which person she is describing, somebody we might have last met thirty odd pages ago.
Doucet has obviously spent a fair amount of time in this hotel. But she is often, if not mostly, describing events, when she wasn’t there. And there are times, when you suspect that she is being very creative with the extensive interview notes she undoubtedly has. This is just one example of a very detailed experience that Hazrat had when he has been wandering around one of the hotel rooms.
“Before he took a last look around the room, he slipped onto the balcony to let the spring wash over him: the sprigs of green and first tight bunches of tiny flowers poking from the rolling vineyard; the chirping of swallows in the thickets of pines. How simple, he thought, the happiness of birds.”
It just felt a little unlikely that Hazrat would have saved up that detailed memory to tell Lyse Doucet, especially as it’s so boring. Hazrat even pops back for another wander around a room towards the end of the book. Perhaps she accompanied him that time. Who knows? Who cares!
Basing the book in a hotel also means that Doucet feels obliged to describe food, tablecloths, towels, sheets and lifts ad nauseam. Her descriptions are mostly cliched. “Crisp white sheets”, “perfectly folded white napkins”, and a lot of “steaming rice” gives the reader an impression that Doucet has read a few hotel internet sites and scraped all the adjectives she could find.
Others who have read the book have suggested that Doucet has written the wrong book, presumptuous I know. But one person suggested that a biography told from her own point of view would have been far more interesting. She appears only rarely and in the third person in this book. Another has suggested a more orthodox history would have been better, where the main players loom larger. Either way, it would have been a lot less boring than the book she actually wrote.