Once in a while, as a reader, you come across a book that, quite simply, bowls you over. A book that holds a story so strong and so … so full of life, so fat with hope and despair and sadness that it makes you feel glad to be living, glad just to have come across it. I felt that way years ago, when I first read The God of Small Things. I felt that way when I first read The Time Traveler’s Wife. And I felt that way again just a few days ago, after I turned the last page of A Thousand Splendid Suns, the second novel from Khaled Hosseini.
On the surface, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a very simple story, making use of several tried-and-true story archetypes. The two heroines of the novel, Mariam and Laila, are separated by class and years – Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man who marries her off to a much older husband when her mother dies, and Laila is the only daughter of a progressive intellectual who lives in Kabul. Both women encounter tragedy early in their...Once in a while, as a reader, you come across a book that, quite simply, bowls you over. A book that holds a story so strong and so … so full of life, so fat with hope and despair and sadness that it makes you feel glad to be living, glad just to have come across it. I felt that way years ago, when I first read The God of Small Things. I felt that way when I first read The Time Traveler’s Wife. And I felt that way again just a few days ago, after I turned the last page of A Thousand Splendid Suns, the second novel from Khaled Hosseini.
On the surface, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a very simple story, making use of several tried-and-true story archetypes. The two heroines of the novel, Mariam and Laila, are separated by class and years – Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man who marries her off to a much older husband when her mother dies, and Laila is the only daughter of a progressive intellectual who lives in Kabul. Both women encounter tragedy early in their lives: for Mariam it comes in the form of her marriage to the cruel and pompous Rasheed; for Laila, tragedy strikes when her home is struck and her parents killed by a rocket, one of many that decimated countless lives in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban.
The story is told in four parts, each part focusing on a separate woman – we learn first of Mariam’s story and then of Leila, so it isn’t until the death of Leila’s parents that we see how these women are brought together in an unlikely friendship, one that will blossom amidst the ruins of their city even as the cruel nature of their lives as women under oppressed rule becomes increasingly apparent.
Hosseini’s prose is clean and deceptively simple – the strength of his storytelling is such that it manages to rise far above the stereotypes of characterization that the novel first presents. There isn’t much to redeem Rasheed, Mariam’s ogre of a husband, while Leila’s childhood sweetheart, Tariq, is sketched so flawlessly that it’s a wonder (to my mind, at least) why half the neighbourhood women aren’t also in love with him. But somehow these characters rise above these initial impressions, while simultaneously managing to convey the growing despair and hardship that everyone is experiencing under Taliban rule.
By the end of the book, I was filled with awe for the way that Hosseini’s prose just seemed to fall into place. By the end of the book, he’d made the city of his novel come alive in a way that seldom affects me as a reader, and these so-called “stereotypical” characters have fleshed out into beings that continue to haunt and affect me days after closing the book. This is a wonderful, haunting story, testament to human survival and love even in the darkest of moments. I highly, highly recommend it.
(That is, for those of you who, like me, haven’t yet read it, unlike the remaining 99.6% of the population who read the book four years ago, when it first came out.) (more)
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