Suns delights with intricate details, plot

By BryAnn Becker

Mirror Variety Editor
March 13, 2008

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns tells the story of two generations of Afghani women with a refinement that intimately involves the reader. Just as he did in The Kite Runner, Hosseini’s character descriptions are complete because of his word choices. Hosseini displays his ability to weave overarching themes of companionship into a delicate plot of two women set over a 30-year time span.

The lives of Mariam and Laila are thrust together through the plights of their own war-torn experiences. Laila, left without a husband or family, is forced into a second marriage with Rasheed. Here, Laila meets his current wife, Mariam, and, through his unforgiving hands, their inner lives become as shambled and oppressed as their homeland.

A Thousand Splendid Suns tells of the plights facing women in such war-torn countries as Afghanistan in an honest and realistic manner. It is the hope that lies within and between the women’s friendship that makes one keep reading.

Hosseini writes with such grace that it evokes tender emotions from the reader. For instance, Mariam admires Laila’s joy over her newborn daughter: “The girl had fits of laughter when the baby passed gas. The tiniest changes in the baby enchanted her, and everything it did was declared spectacular. ‘Look! She’s reaching for the rattle. How clever she is,’ [Laila said.] ‘I’ll call the newspapers,’ said Rasheed.” With each passing page, the book almost becomes a sacred sort of literature.

The intense patriarchal dominance Mariam and Laila face in A Thousand Splendid Suns often becomes unbearable. When will Rasheed stop? At what lines do one’s actions make one inhumane?

At times, the reader is emotionally exhausted. The acts that Rasheed commits are unthinkable; the descriptions this time are not poetic, but frank, honest and excruciatingly real.

The reader, while reading of Mariam and Laila, is simultaneously thrust into Afghanistan’s history. Hosseini includes enough fitting anecdotes and historical contributions to make the reader understand the characters’ world, but he does not turn the novel into a history lesson.

This mixture of narrative and history resounds with life. These women live a life of exclusion and of intense pain, yet their lives are beautiful within the struggle to survive, to merely be. Reading of this existence makes the reader feel vulnerable. The women even become heroic in their stance against Rasheed. Their partnership testifies to the strength and depth of humanity, even in the worst of circumstances.

A Thousand Splendid Suns offers an in-depth look at humanity in the most intimate and heartbreaking of circumstances by a writer whose pen wills graceful perfection.