‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ is the second novel by Khaled Hosseini. His first novel ‘The Kite Runner’ is a huge bestseller. While the Kite runner is a story of two boys of contemporary Afghanistan, their friendship, and their struggle to improve their livelihood amid the ethnic rivalries and the warfare, this book tells the tale of two Afghani women, Laila and Mariam, their life, their sorrow, their friendship and their sacrifices. Unlike his first novel, Khaled Hosseini has written this novel in dual narrative. The theme of the novel is revealed early on by Mariam’s epileptic mother: “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman”. The two main character of the novel is brought together by war, tragedy and abuse.
Author: Khaled Hosseini
384 pages, Bloomsbury
‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ is the second novel by Khaled Hosseini. His first novel ‘The Kite Runner’ is a huge bestseller. While the Kite runner is a story of two boys of contemporary Afghanistan, their friendship, and their struggle to improve their livelihood amid the ethnic rivalries and the warfare, this book tells the tale of two Afghani women, Laila and Mariam, their life, their sorrow, their friendship and their sacrifices. Unlike his first novel, Khaled Hosseini has written this novel in dual narrative. The theme of the novel is revealed early on by Mariam’s epileptic mother: “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman”. The two main character of the novel is brought together by war, tragedy and abuse.
We are dropped into the world of a nine year old girl, Mariam at the beginning. She is harami, an illegitimate child of the owner of Herat’s cinema, Jalil and his maid. She lives with her bitter mother in a makeshift house on the outskirts of Herat while his father lives with his three wives in Herat. Mariam lives a sad and isolated life. She always longs to live with Jalil’s other children as she hates her limited space in his life. Her cold, stubborn and spiteful mother always bullies her. The weekly visit from her charming but insincere father is the only ray of light in Mariam’s life. She adores her father, she finds the emptiness in his love when she pushes too hard for his love, and shows up at his house because he does not take her to cinema on her fifteenth birthday as promised, and he does not let her in.
The very next day, tragedy begins in Mariam’s life, her mother commits suicide. She comes to live with Jalil after her mother’s death. She faces many blame and prejudices from Jalil’s family. But the author does not end her misery there, soon her unfeeling father marries her off to a 40 year old family acquaintance, Rasheed. She goes to Kabul with her husband. Amid all other problems, her life isn’t any more terrible as Rasheed is grumpy but a kind man. But her happiness is short-lived, after Mariam’s continual miscarriages Rasheed shows up his true color. She is trapped in an unhappy and abusive marriage: “Mariam was afraid. She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not”.
However, Khaled Hosseini does something unique. He tells about Rasheed’s sorrowful past which doesn’t justify his actions but it makes you feel sympathy, you pity him for his situation.
Then Hosseini switches to the second narrative- Laila. She is a young neighbor of Rasheed with an unaffectionate, depression-crippled mother and scholarly, adoring ineffectual father. When the Soviets kill her brothers in a war against Afghanistan, she finds solitude in her best friend Tariq, a few year older teenager. The plot becomes more melodramatic when her parent die due to a rocket attack by Americans on her house, alone and broken Laila is forced to marry Rasheed.
Hosseini has shown the contrast in Laila’s perspective about Mariam, she first saw her when she “passed Rasheed, the shoemaker, with his burka-clad wife, Mariam, in tow”. But when she sees the horrible condition of Mariam herself: “For the first time, it was not an adversary’s face Laila saw but a face of grievances unspoken, burdens gone unprotested, a destiny submitted to and endured. If she stayed, would this be her own face, Laila wondered?”
Laila also faces the same abuse as Mariam when she gives birth to her firstborn girl, Aziza and then Hosseini shows how these two women were brought together by helplessness, grief and misery.
Through these events, he not only tells about the condition of Afghani women in the early 1960s to the early 2000s, but he also intends to say that every silent burqa-cladded women has a story of which the world is unaware of. He vaguely describes the historic events taking place in Afghanistan during that time. He focuses less on outer landscapes than inner ones. Politics and history is never the driving force of this novel. In the last chapter, Hosseini has shown an almost happy ending where the people of Afghanistan gets their peaceful life back, it shows his personal longing for a better Afghanistan as Khaled Hosseini is born in Kabul and in his later life, he has shifted to America, this makes the ending little fragile.
Overall this is a fictional novel at its emotive best, it makes you cry like a child. It is not merely a sad story, it lights a fire within us. It is a tale of life and of hope. It is a story of the inevitable conflict which comes with living and the heroism which comes with love. Outstanding, inspirational, every women and men must read this novel.
