27
Apr
2009
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Though it received miles of raving reviews, a lot of people were disappointed in the lack of women characters in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. So it came as a welcome relief to see him focus on female protagonists and their lives in Afghanistan in A Thousand Splendid Suns. And what females they are! These aren’t fragile china dolls. These are strong women, eking out lives for themselves in the often brutally oppressive war-torn land.
The story is about two women, fifteen years and worlds apart in character, though both natives of Kabul. Marriage, affairs, and war bring them together under one roof, where they must learn to get along if either of them want to survive the war and men.
And despite forced marriages and unhappy circumstances, the women find love in the world. They can face anything–numerous beatings, and even death, for the love of children. It is children that give hope to a hopeless generation of women living under the forces of the Taliban.
Hosseini does not to try to save face for his native country. Just as in The Kite Runner, he tells it like it was, like it is. Women are shut up in houses, forced to do their husband’s bidding, and not allowed to leave without a male, lest the Taliban beat them, and return them home where they will be met with more beatings. For women who are married to a brutal man with no other family, there is little hope of stepping out of the house, let alone escape. Desperate to get food, medicine, or see their children, they resort to wearing mulitple layers of their burqas to soften the blows, despite the cenral Asian heat.
And a women who gives birth out of wedlock literally has not options. Bastards, or harami, are a central theme of this book. Neither their mothers nor the children themselves will fare well.
The economic turmoil that followed the civil war, and then the Taliban’s takeover, just make circumstances worse. In a masculine society, a man is judged by the living he makes. Forced to take poor paying lower class jobs discourages men, who take it out on their children and wives. What war, and specifically, the dictates of the Taliban, do to people is another theme throughout the book.
And yet true love can still blossom, if given the chance. Hosseini does not give the impression that the men of Afghanistan are a lot cause. There are still truly good people in the world who do not see women as objects, to be impregnated and discarded.
In the end, love for people and country, despite what the characters have endured, might just have power enough to enable the survivors to change their society, and foster new, brighter generations.
Buy A Thousand Splendid Suns on Amazon
If you like this book/author, you might like:
(my reviews in blue)
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The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
The Namesake by Jumpa Lahiri
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson
Infidel
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Selected Poems of Rumi by Jalal al-Din Rumi
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
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