Life, Death, and Hope in Afghanistan: A Review of A Thousand Splendid Suns

By Drew Curle on 20 August 2007

In 2003, Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, The Kite Runner, became a word of mouth phenomenon and eventually an international favorite, selling millions of copies in 42 languages. Four years later, Hosseini’s follow-up novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, revisits his homeland of Afghanistan, offering Westerners another glimpse into this tumultuous land of Sufi poets, tea houses, and the Taliban. The novel spans three decades and three wars, allowing its readers to put names, faces, and daily routines to recurring news stories of suffering. And make no mistake: this is a story about brutality. Those faces lose teeth, those names are replaced with insults, and those daily routines are continually smashed by bombs and beatings as Hosseini shows the destruction of Kabul, rocket by rocket. A Thousand Splendid Suns makes for uncomfortable yet ultimately rewarding reading.

The story centers on Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women from opposite social conditions whose lives are equally affected by the nation’s turmoil. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman and a house servant, born before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and forced to live in shameful exile with her mother on the outskirts of town. Laila, on the other hand, is a younger woman from an educated, middle-class family. Poverty and disaster overtake her as the novel progresses, while they are the natural conditions of Mariam's life.

The novel begins with sections focused exclusively on each of these characters, before combining the two into a section which alternates between Mariam and Laila. Unfortunately, this structure makes for a slow start. In addition, the early chapters on Mariam’s life are often burdened down with platitudes and pedantic exposition.

In one instance, Mariam’s mother calls Mariam harami (bastard), an insult that mystifies yet terrifies Mariam. Rather than allowing readers to see the effects of this exchange through Mariam’s later actions, Hosseini immediately tells them: “When she was older, Mariam did understand … that a harami was an unwanted thing; that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance” (p. 4).

A key component of the effectiveness of socially-aware novels is the unadorned portrayal of everyday life, which develops an emotional-depth and level of nuance that blunt statements cannot approach. Hosseini’s occasional bullet point plot summaries actively undermine the overall depth of the novel.

Fortunately, these literary missteps are increasingly left behind as the story gains momentum in the latter half of the book. In their place comes a more complete reliance on detailed accounts of Mariam’s and Laila’s daily lives, which become intertwined. The reader watches the two lead characters come to an understanding with one another over late-night cups of tea, while the streets of Kabul become too dangerous for children to venture to school and the hospital turns away women in labor because the Taliban has decreed that women must be treated in separate hospitals from men. The reader witnesses each woman’s penchant for survival amid these growing restrictions, and, through their stories, understands “how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid” (p. 89).

It is precisely in and through these painful moments that the story gains its value. The reader cannot help but be moved by Laila’s and Mariam’s lives — and by extension, by the life of Kabul as a whole. I often found myself setting the book down and feeling something akin to mourning for the city and its former beauty, from which Hosseini’s novel draws its title: “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, / Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls” (p. 172, quoting 17th century Afghan Poet Saib e-Tabrizi). The beard patrols looking for clean-shaven Afghan men to assault, the beatings of women unaccompanied by a male relative, the public executions cheered on in Kabul’s soccer stadium — these things must break our hearts.

But in the midst of all this cruelty and death, A Thousand Splendid Suns also has value because it is a story about life. Throughout the novel, there are glimpses of normalcy and every day living. There is the climb to the top of Afghanistan’s immense twin Buddha statues (before the Taliban destroyed them in early 2001), the “Titanic fever” (yes, the Hollywood movie with Jack and Rose) that gripped Kabul in the summer of 2000 (p. 270), and always the running and chasing games of children. Indeed, perhaps the novel’s most poignant moment comes in the midst of one of these scenes of life. It is after two characters, long-separated by wars, tragedies, and years of hardship, are reunited and fall asleep holding hands: “In the middle of the night, when [she] woke up thirsty, she found their hands still clamped together, in the white-knuckle, anxious way of children clutching balloon strings” (p. 334).

These glimpses may be surprising for the novel’s Western readers, conditioned to expect nothing but war and rumors of war from Afghanistan. Yes, Laila and Mariam do give reality to all the horrors we Westerners see in the news — but they also give reality to all the joys we do not see. I think those of us in the West sometimes need to see people from ‘the rest’ fighting for these joys, as the characters in this novel do, and not just suffering hopelessly. Sometimes, we need a face to put on hope, as well as on suffering.

Last updated 12 January 2009