A Thousand Splendid Suns [Hardcover]

It's difficult to imagine a harder first act to follow than The Kite Runner: a debut novel by an unknown writer about a country many readers knew little about that has gone on to have over four million copies in print worldwide. But when preview copies of Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, started circulating at Amazon, readers reacted with a unanimous enthusiasm that few of us could remember seeing before. As special as The Kite Runner was, those readers said, A Thousand Splendid Suns is more so, bringing Hosseini's compassionate storytelling and his sense of personal and national tragedy to a tale of two women that is weighted equally with despair and grave hope.

With his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini has written a story on par with his widely acclaimed first novel, The Kite Runner. As a counterpoint to the male point of view in his debut tale, his equally cinematic second novel focuses on female perspectives in war-torn Afghanistan, where domestic violence runs parallel to international warfare.
The novel’s title comes from a poem composed by Saeb-e-Tabrizi, a 17th-century Persian poet who gave the following description of Kabul, where most of the novel is set: “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, / Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.” If these romantic lines present the idyllic side of the city, the truth shatters any illusions, for Kabul is transformed into a place of violence-by the Soviet invasion, the factional warlords, and later the Taliban. Midway through the novel, a rocket destroys the house of Laila, one of the central characters, and kills her parents: “A big burning chunk of wood whipped by. So did a thousand shards of glass, and it seemed to Laila that she could see each individual one flying all around her, flipping slowly end over end, the sunlight catching in each. Tiny, beautiful rainbows.”
This dramatic and melodramatic passage typifies the strengths and weaknesses of A Thousand Splendid Suns: on the one hand, a single piece of wood whips by, signalling the beatings Laila will endure at the hands of her brutal husband and her unhappy fate; on the other hand, the improbable count of shards highlights Hosseini’s descriptive powers and narrative pacing. In that split second of total devastation, how likely are those “tiny, beautiful rainbows”? Does trauma permit such aesthetic epiphanies? As Laila strikes the wall and crashes to the ground, she sees her father’s torso with “the tip of a red bridge poking through thick fog.” Her father had worn this shirt with a picture of San Francisco on it as a sign of hope for future departure to freedom near the sea. A Thousand Splendid Suns is filled with such crises and climaxes, and Hosseini’s narrative twists and turns create similar emotional responses in his readers.
The novel begins with Mariam, the other centre of consciousness: “Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.” Harami, we soon find out, means bastard. As such, she is an outcast, but in addition, she “belongs” to a society where families are dismembered and where women are second-class citizens at the mercy of cruel husbands, brothers, or fathers. Hosseini’s occasionally clipped prose-“It happened on a Thursday”-alternates with longer descriptive sentences to create a satisfying rhythm that propels the narrative. In preparation for her father’s arrival, Mariam takes down her mother’s heirloom Chinese tea set. “Nana cherished each blue-and-white porcelain piece, the graceful curve of the pot’s spout, the hand-painted finches and chrysanthemums, the dragon on the sugar bowl, meant to ward off evil.” Grace and symmetry are not meant to last: “It was this last piece that slipped from Mariam’s fingers, that fell to the wooden floorboards of the kolba and ! shattered.” The shattering of this misplaced artefact foreshadows the shattering of lives throughout the rest of the novel.
Mariam’s kolba is a hut of exile outside of Heart where she and her mother live, provided for by Jalil, her wealthy father who already has legitimate children with his three wives. Out of shame, her mother commits suicide and Jalil arranges for Mariam’s marriage to Rasheed, who takes her to his house in Kabul, where her troubles multiply. Forced to wear a burqa outdoors, inside the house she endures her husband’s loathsome lust: “A few moments later, he pushed back the blanket and left the room, leaving her with the impression of the pain down below, to look at the frozen stars in the sky and a cloud that draped the face of the moon like a wedding veil.” Hosseini’s pathetic fallacies and similes are palpable and formulaic. Mariam eventually becomes pregnant, but miscarries while visiting a hamam or bathhouse. Once she loses the baby, Rasheed reacts by forcing her to eat pebbles, a form of stoning. “Then he was gone, leaving Mariam to spit out pebbles, blood, and the fragment! s of two broken molars.”
The narrative shifts abruptly to Laila’s life in “Part Two.” Laila falls in love with Tariq who has lost a leg to a Soviet landmine. Leaving for Pakistan, Tariq is unaware that Laila is pregnant with his baby, Aziza. Mariam saves Laila after her family is blown apart, and in “Part Three” the chapters alternate between the two women. As their lives become more closely intertwined, the narrative itself becomes tighter and more satisfying. Once Laila (falsely) learns that Tariq and his family have been killed before reaching Pakistan, she has to decide what to do about her unwanted pregnancy, so she agrees to become Rasheed’s second wife, much to Mariam’s consternation. However, once Aziza is born, Mariam and Laila become reconciled, realising that they have much in common. They both share a contempt for Rasheed who regularly beats them. Despite the overwhelming cruelty, Laila eventually gives birth to Zalmai, a son for Rasheed who dotes on him while showing contempt for Aziza.!
During one of Rasheed’s brutal attacks on his two wives, Mariam is forced to save their lives by killing him. Like some maimed deus ex machina, Tariq returns to Kabul to claim his earlier love for Laila. To clear the way for Laila’s future with Tariq, Mariam confesses to her crime and is executed. At points in the novel, Hosseini alludes to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: the parallels between Hemingway’s sharks eating the captured fish, and the destruction of Afghan society are all too clear.
At an orphanage, where Rasheed had forced Laila to abandon her, Aziza learns “about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.” Hosseini portrays the region’s earthquakes at various levels and he structures his chapters melodramatically with tremors at the ends and beginnings of many of them. In their hillside retreat in Pakistan, the surviving family finds some comfort after all the calamities. “Laila likes Murree’s cool, foggy morning and its dazzling twilights, the dark brilliance of the sky at night; the green of the pines and the soft brown of the squirrels darting up and down the sturdy tree trunks.” This refuge offers a stark contrast to the bullet-ridden buildings in war-torn Kabul, yet in the end, her city of origin reclaims Laila, who is determined to begin anew amidst the rubble. Amidst the bursting radiance of a thousand suns, she will rebuild her family.
Somewhere between Auden’s “ironic points of light” and One Thousand and One Nights, A Thousand Splendid Suns offers glimmers of hope in an otherwise eclipsed landscape, ravaged by a succession of regimes and male domination. Through the burqa darkly, Hosseini lifts the veil towards a brighter future.
Michael Greenstein (Books in Canada)