French Revolution vs Afghan's seemingly endless war

Wow.
Who'd a thought we'd pick two books that seem so opposite, yet read side-by-side are so similar, albeit expressed very differently on the topic of Civil War.

1k Spelndid Suns ~ more immeidate, real and well, happening now. Made me sick to my stomach in the bigger picture of what atrocities go on and how little is done. While reading this i wanted to pretend this was in some dark age, but no. it stars in the 1950s & takes us to the present. showing how things have gotten worse, and not better up until perhaps the last chapter. there are many tails of "love" and "posseission" sometimes those two concepts meaning the same thing. but there are two main love stories; the platonic love of Mariam and Laila and then Laila and Tariq's romance from youth through separation through adulthood. Against these two threads is the atrocities that Afghanistan has witnessed over the last fifty years. but reading this novel, the love stories were familiar. the atrocities were not. i feel this was a novel written to teach others of these atrocities, gussied up as a work of fiction and some interesting characters.

Sentimental Schoolin' ~ more remote, bourgeois snobbery, but again the constant upheaval of governments form the back-drop for this novel, giving it vitality and authenticiy. Or is it again, an assumed back-drop ,for again the trials of our protagonist in here are familiar, while the current events of the novel are not. so again, we have a chicken-or-the-egg condumdrum. The tone of this book is so interesting to me, as we have the naive Fredric, creating his whole on unstated desires, loaded glances and trying to fit in, while skirmish after skimrsh ensue.
and i mean bourgeois by both definitions, the classic:
In the French feudal order pre-revolution, "bourgeois" was a class of citizens who were wealthier members of the Third Estate, but were overtaxed and had none of the privileges which the aristocracy held (however many bourgeois bought their way into nobility). *courtesy of wikipedia.
and today's usage:
marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity . * courtesy of mw.
Now do those definitions sound like any semi-fictional character we know...? i'd say so. so Sentimental Education could have just been about a selfish bloke who whines, broods and contemplates love in a lot of wrong places. but it is so much more than that; is it a story of unrequited love set against the Revolution of 1848. or is it vice-a-versa. Now we could argue over which is more banal, but in the end, the set-off eachother rather nicely, don't you think?