By Shay Zutshi
A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Riverhead Books
November 2008, 432 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1594483851
Four years after the astounding success of his debut novel The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini released another gripping, moving masterpiece with A Thousand Splendid Suns. Although traditional readers might classify the 2007 work as historical fiction given its backdrop of the Soviet-Afghan war in Kabul, the work is anything but your run-of-the-mill war novel. Through a mother-daughter story that focuses neither on a mother nor on her successive kin, Hosseini crafts a compelling narrative spanning generations that makes you question everything you thought you knew about a multigenerational (multigen) story.
The story’s two protagonists come from disparate worlds. Mariam is the bastard child of a cinema magnate and his former housekeeper, condemned to “quietly..endure all that falls upon [her],” in her mother’s words. Forced to marry a shoemaker at fifteen after disaster strikes, Mariam must uproot her life from a secluded kolba (hut) outside Herat for the bustling streets of the Afghan capital. It’s here in Kabul that her story intertwines with Laila’s–the neighbor’s daughter whose father constantly assures her that, “Marriage can wait, education cannot. You can be anything you want, Laila.” Told through the Soviet-Afghan conflict, the subsequent intra-faction warfare of the Mujahideen, and the rise of the Taliban, the novel explores the perspectives of two women’s lives over forty-five years as they navigate the constantly changing social, political, emotional, and interpersonal dynamics of their country and of their lives.
The work is certainly not the only multigen story with political elements–Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude portrayed the Colombian Thousand Days’ War, and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko outlined the impacts of World War II and the Korean War on Japanese-living Koreans. Unlike either of these two classics, A Thousand Splendid Suns breaks the rules of a traditional multigen story. While the aforementioned works revolve around characters from different generations of the same family, Hosseini does anything but. Mariam and Laila share no familial relation, save for a husband after a rocket blast upends Laila’s life. Their connection weaves a bond tight enough to become a “mother-daughter story,” as Hosseini calls it.
One Hundred Years of Solitude breaks out the generations through the lifespans of individual members of the Buendía family; Pachinko does the same with Sunja’s kin. But in A Thousand Splendid Suns, the generations aren’t broken out by character, but instead through major and minor periods characterized by the unique phases of each protagonist’s life. In the exposition, readers are introduced to Mariam’s humble origins and simple pleasures. Her best friend is a mullah who teaches her verses of the Koran, and she finds beauty in imagining that her rich father will one day accept her into his legitimate family. It is with this dream that she eagerly awaits her father’s arrival at the kolba every Thursday, and it is with crushing of this dream that she reluctantly leaves the only city she has ever known. After her mother’s death, Mariam initially laments the misery of her new life in Kabul before a discovery makes her reconsider that
she might have more in common with her husband than initially thought. She gets along with him quite well at first, as he takes her out and buys her little presents which make her happy. But that quickly switches once her first miscarriage strikes, each subsequent one causing her husband to resent her more and more. Hosseini utilizes these phases as minor generations–her upbringing, initial misery in Kabul, brief marriage enjoyment, miscarriage years–to delve into the raw depths of Mariam’s character and allow readers to empathize with her emotions. Readers will know exactly what she’s thinking and how she’s feeling–a level deeper than either Marquez or Lee reached.
The second major generation switches to Laila’s upbringing in a progressive household. Whereas her friends might be marrying as teenagers and starting families by their twenties, Laila has the potential to ascend to great heights and star in the front page newspapers as a doctor, engineer, or the president of her country. She develops a crush on her childhood friend Tariq in her teenage years, her heart fluttering when he tells her, “I only have eyes for you.” Like Mariam, however, her dreams are shattered when tragedy strikes–in her case, it’s war with the Soviets that has struck her country. In the wake of her parents’ choice to stay in Kabul as Tariq and others flee, her parents perish in the aforementioned rocket blast which deafens Laila in one ear. Laila’s own minor generations of her idealistic childhood, adolescent love, and staunch loyalty to Kabul help the reader identify with her precise motivations influencing her actions in subsequent chapters.
Additional major and minor periods occur further on in the narrative, including Mariam and Laila’s intertwinement, Laila’s progeny, the return of influential characters from both of the womens’ childhoods, and the protagonists’ two separate escapes from their lives in Kabul as they know them. Whether you’re a fan of a gripping wartime period piece, an appreciator of an intricately woven tale spanning people and posterity, or simply a connoisseur of strong plot points where events are marvelously tied together, A Thousand Splendid Suns is certain to keep you glued to your couch all weekend, eagerly turning the pages in anticipation of what happens next. Though it’s not quite The Kite Runner, Hosseini’s follow-up surpasses Pachinko and One Hundred Years of Solitude to cement its spot in my top five books list. It’s 100% worth the read–I guarantee that you will not regret it