A Thousand Splendid Suns
Once I picked up Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, I barely put it down again until I was finished. I found myself thoroughly involved in the lives of Mariam and Leila, unwilling even to stop to fix dinner! The author of Kiterunner has hit another home run.
There was a time when we would listen to older state department types talk – with enormous longing – about their tours of duty in Afghanistan, pre-Soviet invasion, pre-Taliban, pre-American occupation. Have you ever read James Michener’s Caravan? There are two countries I long to vist, but the countries they are now are not the countries I heard people talk about – Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Our friends loved their times in these two countries.
A Thousand Splendid Suns opens in a small village outside Herat, and then takes us to Kabul. Mariam is born harami, a bastard, of a village cleaning woman in the house of a very wealthy man. Her father builds a small hut for her mother and herself in a remote part of the small village, and visits Mariam every week. Life is simple, and difficult, but also full of kind people who visit and who are concerned with Mariam’s welfare.
After marrying, Mariam goes to Kabul and learns a new way of life with her husband, Rasheed. What fascinates me with Hosseini is that while Rashid is one of the villians of this novel, he is just a man, doing the best he can given his own upbringing and limitations. In a sense, he is “everyman”, the strutting, domineering, sometimes brutal and abusive husband we find in every culture. But Hosseini also gives him transient bouts of kindness which blow through a little less often than the transient bouts of cruelty.
He also gives us good men, in this book, in the person of Jalil, the father of Mariam, who steps up to the plate in acknowledging Mariam and supporting her and her mother, but fails to nurture in the very real way women need nurturing from their fathers in order to reach their full potential in life. Hosseini also gives us a very strong man in the book, Tariq, who, although he has only one leg, is more wholly a man than any other man in the book. I imagine that this is not unintentional. (How Kissingerian is that for a double negative?!)
Written almost entirely in the Afghan world of women, we see through the eyes of Mariam, and later Leila, the transitions in Afghanistan and their impacts on daily life. We experience happiness with them, and peaceful scenes in quiet moments, raising the children, stepping outside into the garden at night to share a cup of tea and a shared bowl of halwa.
Between the moments of peacefulness, we also experience incoming morter rounds, explosions, marauding bands of warlords, and starvation. We go into a women’s hospital under Taliban control, where there are no medications, no running water, no instruments, and an Afghani female doctor does a C-section with no anaesthesia and is required to keep her burqa on. We watch a mother abandon her role and take to her bed when her two sons are killed fighting the Soviets, we experience betrayal and we experience helplessness, and we experience a Kabul women’s prison. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a rich feast of experiences, juxtaposing the everyday chores of women around the world – cooking, raising children, laundry – with events on the world stage.
(Available from Amazon for $14.27 plus shipping.)
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I actually have it on the list of books to shop for, including When We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris and The Black Swan by Nassim Talib
Sounds like an interesting book to read, especialy about ethnic cultures like afghanistan.
I read “The Kite Runner” when I was in college, I finished it over the weekend, it was amazing!
I’m reading “A Thousand Spelendid Suns” now, and its breaking my heart, everytime the issues are too much to bear I put it down for a couple of days.
I have never cried over a book as I did while reading “A thousand splendid suns”.
Oooh oooh amazing review. Will definitely get my hands on it. I think Hussein has a really good grasp of womanly emotion – in a sense, I mean, that he writes women well 🙂
I read The Kite Runner a while back and loved it – but since then, I might have overdosed on books about Afghanistan, memoirs and biographies as well as fiction. So I’d probably wait a while before reading A Thousand Splendid Suns. If you’re interested in the plights of teachers in Afghanistan, an American journalist (Ann Jones) wrote a non-fiction book called Kabul in Winter, in which she trains English teachers, among other things. I strongly recommend! It’s heart wrenching!
Another really good book is written by a British journalist, whose family originally came from Afghanistan, called Saira Shah. She also wrote a non-fiction book named The Story Teller’s Daughter in which she explains the Afghanistan her father always described juxtaposed to the Afghanistan ravished by war and the Taliban’s brutal rule. I strongly recommend too 🙂
Like you, I’d love to go to Afghanistan one day. (Afghanistan, India and Iran – I’d love love love to go to these countries!). Plus, Afghani men are hot, I think ;p~
Currently I’m reading The Kite Runner and I just got over the part where Amir has graduated from high school. I believe the movie version is gonna be damn good and hopefully will able to score some Oscar nods.
Theres also a book called “The Bookseller of Kabul” I read it a while back, and I remember liking it a lot!
KJ, GREAT recommendations, I just ordered both!
The Black Swan Amazon says:
Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan, in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world
Then We Came to the End Amazon says:
a group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the ’90s boom. Indignation rises over the rightful owner of a particularly coveted chair (“We felt deceived”). Gonzo e-mailer Tom Mota quotes Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the midst of his tirades, desperately trying to retain a shred of integrity at a job that requires a ruthless attention to what will make people buy things.
Thanks, KJ!
Qaiss – Hosseini is so good that he makes all of us Afghanis, too. He allows us to see through the eyes of others, and we experience their feelings. He is an amazing author.
Oh, Chirp, oh sweetie, it IS a strong book. What amazing women! *sends Chirp a hug*
True Faith – If it isn’t too personal, what parts made you cry? I didn’t cry in this one, and neither did I have the feeling of impending doom I felt throught Kiterunner, you know, how you know from the beginning something in this kid’s life is very very wrong and you don’t know if he will ever be able to fix it? In this one, somehow, I believed all the way through in these women and their ability to endure and eventually prevail. Even Mariam, in her own way, prevailed, don’t you think? Talk to me!
Thank you, cixousianpanic, and I just ordered both books you recommended. And I suspect you have read “Reading Lolita in Tehran” and “The Sewing Circles of Herat?” I know, I know, you have other things going on in your life besides reading.
I’d love to go to both Iran and Afghanistan, oh, I would love to, but not because Afghan men are hot (!!!!) We really love nomadic textiles, and you know me and photographing mosques and tiles . . and both AdventureMan and I are fascinated by the very thought of going. And Iranian and Afghani food! In Saudi Arabia, we had Afghani restaurants we would go to, I loved the bread, which is different from other flatbreads, spongier and stretchier.
General question – is there an Afghan area in Kuwait? An Afghan restaurant?
Angelo, I hope it does well. Did you hear the BBC interviews on Tuesday, where they are talking about the controversy with the beginning scene, the rape?
I can only hope the movie is as cinematic as the book. Did you see the movie Khandahar?
Yes! Chirp! I read it, too, and I really liked it! There was some controversy about that book and I can kind of understand it, too. The actual bookseller said she had violated his hospitality (didn’t you kind of find yourself thinking that as you read it, too?) and she says she told him from the beginning she was writing a book. I believe she probably did, but I am sure her portrayal of him (old goat with his young new wife) was very humiliating to him; and you can kind of see both sides.
what made me really cry is the part were Mariam waited outside her father’s door, and when he didn’t let her in she returned to find her mum dead 😦
How sad to lose them both in one day, though in different ways!
As you said the kite runner was a different thing, it’s the guilt and the shame feelings that no human can handle! so painful!
True Faith, AdventureMan and I talked about this over dinner, and I mentally reviewed all the parts of the book and together we could think of several parts that if we were really feeling could make us cry. You are right, the loss of the fantasies she always had with her father, her disappointment, and then her mother’s suicide on top of it, that was enough to devastate a person. And then being passed along to Rasheed, like a used tissue. Also, having to leave Aziza at the orphanage, that was the very worst part for me, knowing your child wants to be with you, and knowing the family is starving, truly desperate times. But I really thank you for your comments, because it helped me think more carefully about the book, and to review it with my husband, what the troublesome parts could be.
And I am thinking, too, that one of the things I really like about Hosseini is that Rasheed isn’t totally bad. Mostly, you get that he is a product of a way of thinking, not stupid, but doesn’t have all the tools he needs to get along with women, or to try to understand them. He’s a brute, but not without some redeeming qualities. But you don’t regret his . . .ummm. .. passing on (!)
I cried so much when I read “The Kite Runner” so there’s now way I’m reading this (or watching TKR movie either)
Oh yeah I’ve read Lolita in Tehran, but not the other one – I will definitely check the other one out too ;P yeah my reason for wanting to go sounds so silly in comparison lol 🙂 but i agree they have such a rich and vibrant culture – very mesmerizing! and no I’m sorry, I don’t know if they have Afghani restaurants and my experience with the Iranian restaurant at the Sheraton were very very very disappointing ;s
EniGma, I think you could be right about the movie, but I want to see the scenery, although I think it was filmed in China. But in truth, this book deals with some tough issues, and the women involved are real role models for all of us. They bend, they adapt, they endure and they PREVAIL. I have a feeling you would like it a lot.
CP – There is a good Iranian restaurant, Shebestan, at the Crown Plaza.
There is a good hole-in-the-wall Iranian restaurant along Gulf Road, near Abu Halifa, called Iranian Restaurant. I wouldn’t go there alone, I would go with a friend. It is small, but good, and they bake their own bread. Sometimes when it is prayer time, they just roll out the rugs and pray, and then go back to work.
There is a off-shoot-section of the Mubarakiyya souks where I think all the restaurants are Iranian. I know there is an Iranian baker there. Unfortunately, in the restaurant section I only see men, never a woman, but the food smells wonderful!
It is a very rich culture, full of beauty and poetry. 🙂
hello.i want to know to live in kabul orphanage the teacher laila.have her mail adreess.i want to help this orphanage.