A Thousand Splendid Suns

A friend recommended me this book, but at first I couldn't read it. This book is hard to read, because of the domestic abuse, but if you can stand it, it is also such a fascinating window into the last few decades of Afghanistan's history, powerful, full of tension. You will be rooting for these two women and looking forward to the liberation of Kabul as much as they did - will it be in time to save them? Even more poignant given that we have now gone back to the days of the Taliban. OK, don't despair, there are light moments! - one detail that sticks with me is when the Titanic craze hits Taliban-controlled Kabul - Titanic burkhas!

I first read A Thousand Splendid Suns just over a decade ago (according to Goodreads). I remember reading it in a Scottish holiday chalet, having borrowed it from their library, and being happy that it is such a fast read because I needed to finish before it was time to leave! I loved the story then, as I did this time around, however I notice that I have matured as a reader over the past ten years because I wasn't as blindly impressed.

Following in the wake of Hosseini's lauded novel The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses on the female experience in Afghanistan. I don't think it has anywhere near the same depth though. The story zips along at a good pace and, don't get me wrong, this is a very readable novel. I easily got caught up in Mariam and Laila's lives, feeling sorrowful or angry on their behalf as they are pulled from pillar to post seemingly without being allowed to make any decisions for themselves. Mariam and Laila suffer greatly through their lives yet always seem to remain dignified and almost noble, and I felt the male characters stayed rather flat. Rasheed in basically brutish and Tariq is nice. Hosseini has obviously written with a Western audience in mind so, disappointingly, I didn't feel I got much detail of Afghan culture other than those aspects depicting female oppression and I wanted more. I would describe A Thousand Splendid Suns as the fast food of Middle Eastern literature. It's great while I was reading, but turned out ultimately to be unsatisfying.

this isn't an actual review since I read it in May of last year (it is now January)

my mother is currently reading this. I haven't said anything, because I hate talking about books outside of my disgusting, old computer. this is especially uncomfortable because I know what happens at the end and she is already sad. I CAN'T SAY ANYTHING

send help

I read this for a book club for July 2021. This was my first time reading Khaled Hosseini after years and years—I had previously read The Kite Runner when I was probably in high school or so, and I remembered enjoying that one a great deal. Coming to this book with the perspective of an adult who knows better and has seen more things, this book did not live up to my expectations.

Hosseini said in an interview that his aim was to represent the female perspective of war-torn Afghanistan through several periods of war and occupation of the country. However, I don’t feel that he has succeeded all that much in this. Yes, we do have a narrative centered on female characters, but they are mostly stagnant until the ending and devoid of personality other than the male characters that define them. I did not find this particularly empowering or hopeful, but I am also not a woman, so perhaps my inability to relate factors into this. Still, it’s strange given how even when the two main women in the story bond, they still can’t escape the specter of maleness that haunts them.

On a minor side note—why are most, except perhaps one, of the male characters in this book shit? Is Hosseini trying to make some point about men and/or Afghan men? I don’t know if Hosseini was criticized for the lack of female presence in his previous book, but if he had written a book that similarly only has terrible female characters, I am sure there would be backlash. Of course there are patriarchal injustices and crimes perpetrated by men in Afghanistan, but I would have liked to see a bit more redemption for some of our supporting and not-completely-awful male characters. It is worth reading what Lisa See said in her NY Times review: “At the same time, with the exception of Laila’s absent lover, the male characters seem either unrelentingly evil or pathetically weak. If a woman wrote these things about her male characters, she would probably be labeled a man-hater.”

Mariam and Laila also fall into the trap of being typecast characters—even the main antagonists of the book do so. Mariam is the shy, matronly figure and Laila is the so-called ‘Beauty’ who is educated and smart. Rasheed is the stereotypical evil villain who is evil for the sake of being evil. It seemed a little soap opera-ish at times. The characters can be described in brief with this quote: “These were the circumstances of her life, the inescapable truths of it.” There is little to no agency for them, understandably, but the aspects of their lives that do not revolve around men do not feature strongly, nor their inner minds beyond a few repetitive thoughts like the quote.

My main issue with this book though is how heavy-handed it is in its portrayal of cruelty and the historical situation in Afghanistan. Hosseini tries to interweave the war and historical elements into the narrative, but when your characters enter a room and have to announce that so-and-so was killed or that this regime was toppled, it’s not an appealing style—that is telling, not showing history. So, the historical narrative felt abrupt and it was hard to keep track of generals and regimes when they were so nebulous to the main narrative.

The other issue that stems from that is that the book is nothing but cruelty, torture, and misery for the characters. I’m not one who shies away from dark subject matter, but this book was obviously written with a western, non-Afghan audience in mind. At times, it seems like the book wants the reader to think to themselves, ‘Wow, I had no idea how bad things were in Afghanistan!’ And perhaps for many readers this is true. But as someone who comes from a similar cultural background, a lot of the more mundane aspects of the story were portrayed together with the most horrible without distinction, as if the reader must lump them all together. I have an uncle Rashid who has multiple wives (though they live in different houses), and domestic violence is largely excused and considered ‘normal’ in my culture. Women are told to veil and to obey their husbands without question, and many seemingly illogical aspects of religion are justified post hoc. For me, this book was just tedious.

Hosseini seems like he wanted to pack on the emotional punches, perhaps so that the western reader may put themselves in a savior position and want to try and ‘better’ this situation, or see themselves as superior… sorry, this doesn’t make much sense because I can’t articulate it well, but the whole tone of the book is like this and it put me off. There is a term for this sort of thing, ‘trauma porn’, wherein group or individual trauma is portrayed in media for the entertainment of an individual not from that group. Whether it is stories about LGBT youth who are kicked out of their homes after coming out, or ‘inspirational’ stories about people with disabilities simply living their day-to-day, narratives like these emphasize a person or group’s trauma as a kind of exhibition to an outsider. The reader may cry or feel terrible about the characters’ suffering, but at the end of the day, this is mere entertainment for such a reader. This is daily life for others.

Despite my issues, I did enjoy parts of the book, certain side characters, and Hosseini’s prose, often described as ‘lyrical’. I might say his prose can be a bit heavy-handed too at times, but it is written beautifully—and I appreciate the references to poetry and ghazals, among others. This may be a great and emotionally beautiful book for many people, but this was not the case for me. I am curious and might revisit his earlier work to see if my opinion of it has held, or if I, as an adult, would no longer be charmed by Hosseini. Either way, I commend him for putting Afghanistan on the map for a lot of westerners and attempting to humanize his country to a world that mostly saw it as an uncivilized war zone (though some things in this book seem to reinforce that stereotype…?). It certainly would not have been an easy task, so kudos. In the postscript he writes, “I hope that I will engage you, that I will transport you and that the novel will move you and leave you with some sense of compassion and empathy for Afghan women whose suffering has been matched by very few groups in recent world history.”

I think this (and Kite Runner also) is an important book to read. While still fiction, Khaled Hosseini does a good job at painting how awful life has been for citizens living in conflict regions like Afghanistan. It isn't a happy book, not even in the slightest, but it is a powerful one.

I think my only other comment to add about this book (because other reviews have said much the same things I feel about it) is that I think I prefer [b:The Kite Runner|77203|The Kite Runner|Khaled Hosseini|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1579036753l/77203.SY75.jpg|3295919] to this one just a little bit. While everything included in A Thousand Splendid Suns is legitimate and believable, it's extremely unrelenting and feels like it could have been better paced. I don't remember The Kite Runner feeling like you're constantly sliding from one bad moment to the next like how this book felt.

It's still an extremely good book, highly recommend.

Any book that leaves me crying, except if it's heavy and I drop it on my toes, is a great book.

A deep insight into "everyday" life in a war ridden country from the perspective of two women. It brought the horror of war to my mind as well as the terror of arranged marriages. There were very compassionate scenes too, which showed how much a deep friendship can help in a time of hardship.
I very much liked the long timeframe the novel spanned, as it shows that Afghanistan hasn't been peaceful for a time much longer than at least I percieved in the media.

This was one of the best books that I've ever read. A friend recommended it to me during my exams. Just for the sake of checking it out, I started reading it but as soon as I completed first few pages, I was hooked. Then in the next three days, amidst all the papers, I read it from cover-to-cover.