A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
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Book Reviews of A Thousand Splendid Suns
Book Review: Spontaneous outpourings of an Afghan heart
Summary: 5 Stars
Splendid Indeed! I would like to use all those hackneyed expressions about Hosseini which usually appear on the cover page of a bookseller. Excellent! Suspenseful! Unforgettable! Gripping! Heartbreaking! I would be honest in using all of them and still it wouldn't be enough! Yes! Hosseini is that good!
Since, The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter series I haven't read a more gripping book. A Thousand Splendid Suns has everything you may want in a book. I won't go into the details of the story. It tells stories of two Afghan women and the traumas they have to bear under the Islamic regime of the Taliban.
Hosseini is indeed a master storyteller and you get hooked to it. He is so intensely graphic that you see every little movement described in the book, and listen to every wind rustling; every sigh falling.
He moves our deepest emotions and we get carried. We laugh with the characters; we feel their pain; we look at Afghanistan the way Afghans do.
The narrative is very authentic. Hosseini knows about the place he is talking about. He knows his Afghanistan, very unlike the Booker winner Adiga, who knows next to nothing about India. He is also clear about his content and has no tolerance for Islamic fundamentalism. A Thousand Splendid Suns is also not politically motivated like, A Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.
The havoc Taliban brought upon Afghanistan is vividly portrayed. He does not ignore its tragedy for the sake of being politically correct. The inhumanity of Taliban and all its supporters, the barbarity of Islamic fundamentalism and the brunt women have to bear under Islam is truthfully portrayed.
He does not forget to pay a tribute to the destroyed statues of Bamiyan. He does not express joy over 9/11, like Hamid does in A Reluctant Fundamentalist. He does not shun the truth.
His style is pleasantly accessible and familiar. He suffers from no -ism and nothing of post-modern claptrap enters into Hosseini's narrative. If the First World War jilted European psyche, making their poets and writers confused, the Afghanistan War has made Hosseini even more definite in his narrative, clearer in his vision. Some call him, an `old fashioned writer'. I love him for it. He is a little melodramatic and uses some standard attention engaging techniques of novelists and thriller writers, something which may throw him out of the mainstream of standard literature, but looking at the crap `mainstream' literature is producing these days, it is better not to be included in it.
Not since reading Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie, have I wept over a book. Russia and England were two places which had become alive in my imagination through literature. I now add Afghanistan to that list.
Book Review: An Intimate Potrait of Women in Afghanistan's War-Torn Years
Summary: 5 Stars
I weeped at the end of this book. Simply weeped.
Before I get into its praises, let's get a few shortcomings out of the way. There are a few aspects to Hosseini's writing style that I'm not fond of, and the same minor complaints I had in The Kite Runner also apply here, except to a lesser degree. He still did some explicit foreshadowing, but only a couple times, and in at least one case, I do think it added a bit of suspense rather than detracted from the current narrative. Later on, when foreshadowed events occured, characters undoubtedly conjured up old memories that reminded the reader that said event was foreshadowed - as if Hosseini didn't trust the reader to be smart enough to remember on his own. But, in most cases, it seemed natural that if these events were really occurring, the characters would remember these old conversations with fondness, regret, or poignancy, so it wasn't really out of line to write about such memories. Overall, I think Hosseini's writing is more developed in this book, and ultimately, my rating of a book depends a great deal on how much of an impression it left on me, which is why I gave this book 5 stars despite these minor annoyances.
If The Kite Runner was, in part, a gentle and lovely portrayal of a peaceful, bygone time in Afghanistan history, then A Thousand Splendid Suns is its natural successor, telling intimate stories of women who endured the recent decades of multiple wars that tore the country apart and made it unrecognizable to its own citizens. On one level, this book serves a purpose by informing readers of Afghanistan's political turmoil and the nightmare of living in a war zone. But, it is also a book about motherhood, self-sacrifice, endurance, grace, and unadulterated love for one's homeland.
The book is filled with interesting characters. A woman who, to a stranger, may look like the embodiment of weakness and servility, but proves to be a fountain of admirable grace, wisdom, and strength not in spite of, but because of her sufferings. A man who mistreated women with shocking cruelty out of a misguided sense of tradition and conservatism, but also not unintelligent and still capable of affection and tenderness. Another woman who has enormous potential as a child, who is raised to value education above all else, but who must succumb to the draconian laws of the Taliban.
I was so invested in the characters that two-thirds of the way through the book, I started to fear that an undesirable conclusion would ruin the book for me. Without giving anything away, I'll say that I loved the ending.
Book Review: Hosseini is a Modern Dickens
Summary: 5 Stars
Dr. Khaled Hosseini avoids any sophomore slump with his second novel, "A Thousand Splendid Suns." Like The Kite Runner, "Suns" takes place over approximately 30-40 years in Afghanistan, beginning in the years before the Soviet takeover and progressing to the years of the Taliban. Where the first book followed the lives of predominantly male characters, "Suns" concentrates on female characters. Their story is harrowing.
Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of the owner of a cinema in Herot. She lives with her bitter, clingy mother in a shack outside of town and in the beginning of the book loves her father more than anyone. Circumstances make her reconsider her father's love and she is ultimately compelled to marry Rasheed, an older shoe cobbler from Kabul. Rasheed is as vivid and vicious a villain as Dicken's Fagin.
In Kabul Marian lives in the same neighborhood as Laila, a beautiful honey-haired girl who lives with her educated father and shrewish mother. Laila has eyes only for Tariq, a thoughtful, handsome boy who lost a leg to a land mine.
The Afghan people must endure years of Soviet invasion prior to the Soviets being expelled by the Mujahideen. Rather than use the opportunity to build a unified country, Mujahideen war lords fight among themselves and against the citizens for years prior to takeover by the Taliban, with enforcement of a strict and repressive Sharia. Where pre-Soviet Afghan women enjoyed rights including education and employment similar to men, women under the Taliban faced severe punishments for being seen or heard outside of the home. They could not travel without being covered by Burqas or without the company of a male relative. They could not be educated or employed and could not make any attempt to make themselves more attractive.
Under these extremely harsh conditions our characters endure and persevere. This is not a happy-go-lucky tale - several passages made me flinch. But Hosseini creates characters so real that empathy follows easily and when these characters face danger and peril we can feel a fraction of their suffering.
In the way that Dickens didn't sugarcoat Victorian London, Hosseini gives us an unvarnished look into Afghanistan of the last few decades. But where Dickens wrote many of his best-known works in serial fashion for periodicals and was paid by the word, Hosseini makes the most of his prose. I look forward with great interest to his next work.
Book Review: Masterfully written
Summary: 4 Stars
"A thousand splendid suns" shine over Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. But that is according to an old Afghan poem, and the truth, as revealed in this historical novel, is rather different: a city torn apart and ravaged for decades by brutal wars, and a city where women may find themselves enslaved by the rule of sharia (islamic law) and oppressed by sadistic men.
The story is about two women whose lives become intertwined. Their friendship is one of the 'positive' themes of this book, but many others are equally important: maternal love, love of one's country and origins, faith, hope. These themes fight a constant, and mostly losing, battle against oppression, violence, hate, and hardship.
The most striking in this ambitious modern-historical saga is how well Mr. Hoseini writes; being non-native to the English language and trained as a medical doctor rather than an artist, he nonetheless writes a superb prose that captivates and mesmerizes the reader.
The story has it all: tragedy, hope, romance, suspense, and despair - perhaps mostly that last item of the list. The back-cover claim, the standard blah-blah about how friendship and love overcomes all the hardships and so on and so forth, reveals a weakness of sorts in this book, the decision of the author to end on a happy note - none too forcefully, and not entirely implausibly, but somewhat incongruently with the facts as presented quite meticulously up until that point. After all the sufferings of the protagonists it is, simply put, too hard to imagine that they will all live happily ever after.
The story may also be faulted, perhaps, for being a bit too black-and-white: the suffering women are almost too good and pure, the oppressing men of such unadulterated evil that one would like to give Rasheed (who does most of the beating) a chance to say something to his defense, and one wonders if Mariam never ever lost her temper.
The most interesting weakness in this impressive work is, however, the author's decision (for a decision it must have been) not to address what could have been the central question emerging from this tale: to what extent the religion can be held responsible for the atrocities committed in its name.
Having said that, this novel is a delightful read that can be warmly recommended for anyone looking for a beautifully written saga about the lives of two women in a very foreign part of the world, against an important and authorative backdrop of contemporary history.
Book Review: A Pakistani woman's take on this book
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent work of fiction! Let me first give you the basic synopsis of the book: It starts with the childhood of Maryam, a girl born out of wedlock in a city in Afghanistan, circa 1960. Some tragic incidents occur, after which her reluctant father and his wives pressure Maryam to marry a widowed man thirty years older than her. Of course, Maryam didn't want this fate, but the husband is at least reasonably nice in their society's standards--at first. Over the course of the book, he becomes cruel, hypocritical, and condescending, and eventually marries a second wife. There is an even larger age gap between him and the new bride, and his behavior patterns with this woman are pretty much the same. The two co-wives eventually create a partnership and rely on each other to try to escape the house and flee to northern Pakistan, where a lot of other Afghanis have been moving to evade the politics and war caused by the Soviets, mujahiddeen, and Taliban.
As many others suggest, it is a real page turner. You come across many surprises while learning about the political climate of a country that people need to know more about these days. You find yourself rooting for the women in the story, and you might even tear up at some of the more emotional parts towards the end. For that reason, this is a must-read.
There's one more thing I hope you take from this book that I don't think many reviewers have commented on: in this society, as in any other, there are good people, and there are bad people. Being a Pakistani woman myself, I'm annoyed that people assume that most of the women in this region are oppressed, because I've never felt that way. Maryam's father was a coward, and her husband was brutal. However, the other co-wife's father, as well as her love interest, were both kind men. Her father championed women's education, and encouraged her to follow her dreams. Having multiple wives is NOT the norm among Muslim families, and forced marriages are against Islamic doctrine. However, these instances do happen sometimes, usually among the less educated (as the antagonists in this story were largely uneducated). Rather than show Afghanis as practicing a completely backwards culture, I think this book really shows there needs to be more education here and anywhere else human rights are violated.
It's certainly a story you'll remember for a long time, no matter how you feel about the plot itself.