Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns is written by Afghan author Khaled Hosseini (followed his debut The Kite Runner which I haven’t read- but I have ordered from Amazon based on how magnificent this book is!)

The book has two main characters- Mariam and Laila. It is through these two women we get an insight of the female world of Afghanistan. Mariam, as an illegitimate child, had a fairly unhappy childhood and when her mother hangs herself her father and his wives marry her off at the age of 15 to Rasheed, a much older shoemaker from Kabul. After she miscarries a child, Rasheed becomes abusive towards Mariam. In contrast to Mariam, Laila has a fairly happy upbringing to begin with. Although her mother is a depressive and idolises her sons too much, Laila enjoys a great relationship with her dad, has a great friend Tariq (who becomes a constant reminder of the child casualties of war- he lost his leg as a young child to a mine) and is highly intelligent with a good education. After a series of striking but brutal plot forming events (including the death of Laila’s parents) Laila ends up marrying Rasheed and living with Mariam. The brutality and torment Rasheed puts the women through is horrific. He makes them burqas to hide their identities (it is one of the most soul destroying parts of the books when Laila mirrors Mariam’s words when they both admit to feeling safe behind the burqas.

(To show how this novel struck me was when I was at work a lady with really pretty eyes came in wearing a burqa and her husband was really rude and brushed past her, shouted at her and left her to deal with the kids it made me wonder... what is her life like? I only finished the book the night before but it made me wonder and it still does...)

Anyway, back to the point... Hosseini vividly describes what life is like for women in a society where they are valued only for their reproductive ability and home-making skills. The marriage of both Laila and Mariam to Rasheed just becomes daily torture and their home is a prison that they are charged with to keep by fear and physical recrimination if they fail.

What is particularly novel about Hosseini is how he depicts the two women and their burgeoning friendship. For a man he really nails the relationship between women on the head and also how females’ minds work. It is hard to write from another gender’s perspective and many women fail to write a good solid male character and men find it hard to write a convincing female character. However, Hosseini really wins this one. In fact I thought he was a woman until I read the author’s blog bit on the back cover. Just an aside here: The bit that finally made me, the hard old nut crack, was when Laila returns to the village and reads Mariam’s father’s letter that he left for her. Only the reader knows the significance of the videotape and it really wrenched at my heartstrings. Anyone who has read the book and not cry at that... well, heartless is what you are.

Anyways, I shan’t reveal too much more of the plot as I do not want to spoil it for you, but it is a real eye opener and a terrific story. Read it. This book has already made it into my top ten I think. Or at least the top ten books that opened my eyes. The last one I can remember doing so is The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood so I am going to make a few comparisons between the two (plus they have a similar story plot of a) an oppressive patriarchy, b) female protagonists, c) they conjure up a world that is recognisable in some manner but not really known of, and d) they have deep psychological, bloody and violent content within.

What Hosseini has got right about this book with I think Atwood failed in was making it seem real. I suppose that Hosseini had the added benefit that the war in Afghanistan is still raging. There is no conclusion in sight in the real Afghanistan, unlike in his book where he actually paints the reader a picture of how he would like Afghanistan to be. For all the brutality, evil and death there is that underlying buoyancy that makes the reader feel that something has to go right. (Believe me I had to keep going to find a good happy bit to finish reading on for the night otherwise I would have a nightmare!!) Atwood never intends for The Handmaid’s Tale to be happy or optimistic. When she concludes her story with the protagonist escaping the chauvinistic and sexist society she lives in (a futuristic look at where hardline feminism will end up- in a world dominated by men), so the reader thinks “Yay! It is all over!” Nope. The epilogue completely shatters that view. Like a hundred years later the tapes she made of her story are played back the reader sees the beginnings of oppressive patriarchy rearing its head again. Bam! That happy ending is over. We are doomed to repeat ourselves.

Natasha Walter (hardline feminist too by the sounds of her) of the Guardian notes that Hosseini is particularly skilled in telling a story that seems unbearable but his direct tone and “the sense that you are moving to a redemptive ending” makes it “slip down easily”. I agree with her on this point, but she soon turns on this “sense (of)...moving to a redemptive ending” and says that Hosseini’s desire to believe in the deliverance of Afghanistan means that “the ending verges on the schmaltzy”. She continues to write that “Hosseini's understandable longing for a beautiful return to life for the oppressed people of Afghanistan has made for an ending that is just a little flimsy”.

I disagree with her here. This book has been more than a story in some ways. Hosseini has given us a history lesson, a real, down to earth, based on people, society and life in Afghanistan, a country that the West has little or no understanding of. I will hold my hands up and agree that I knew next to nothing. This book has educated but it hasn’t been rammed down our throats. It is just fact, story, fact, story. The combination of both working well and the ending- well, the book was published in 2007 and there is still no end to the story now in 2009. He ends it with that sense of prevailing optimism that has been present throughout the book and he ends with his own idealised version of his home country. He has transcended the real world and has given us his view of what Afghanistan should be, or perhaps more accurately, what it could be. The ending is a statement of one Afghan’s dream for his country. Schmaltzy? Flimsy? I don’t think so.

So at the end of the book I was shook up, battered and bruised (figuratively speaking) myself. Sleepless nights from either reading what happened next so gripped to the story or not being able to sleep for having finished on a particularly harrowing part... my oh my... what a novel.