A Thousand Splendid Suns

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.”