A Thousand Splendid Suns

‘A Thousand Splendid Suns,’ by Khaled Hosseini, serves as a companion to his acclaimed ‘The Kite Runner’. Against the backdrop of the social and political history of Afghanistan from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, Hosseini paints a portrait of the lives and loves of Mariam and Laila, from their girlhood onwards. The story is vividly written and the characters beautifully drawn, entwining the readers' emotions with their waxing and waning fortunes. By the end of Part 1, I was so attached to Mariam, that I felt devastated to leave her languishing in an abusive marriage while we follow Laila’s story in Part 2. We hear no more than a passing mention of Mariam for the next 100 pages! Was this a deliberate technique on the part of the writer - to make Mariam as invisible to us as she had become to the world? Perhaps.

I love a novel with two or more storylines that eventually interconnect. In ‘The Twelfth Cross,’ I switched between Daniel and Clement’s timelines in part 1. But Hosseini’s structure, part 1 Mariam, part 2 Laila, felt quite brutal. My expertly-aroused empathy was toyed with. This was my only gripe with the book. When I shared this with my husband, he joked about me founding The Royal Society for the Protection of Readers’ Feelings! Or perhaps The Royal Society for the Protection of Fictional Characters! I’m tempted.

‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ was at times harrowing but the author led us beautifully to a note of hope. However, the contemporary reader is left with a bitter taste. The novel was published in 2007 when the Taliban had been ousted, so we thought, for good. But since the withdrawal of U.S. and other Western troops in 2021, the beleaguered people of Afghanistan have been left once more under a regime which prohibits singing, dancing, chess playing, kite flying, writing books, watching films and painting pictures. And my heart goes out to the Mariams and Lailas to whom education and work is denied and for whom there is no recourse if they suffer domestic abuse.

As predicted in the Hosseini’s story, the West has moved on. We have other fish to fry. Shame on us.

I’m ashamed to admit that my copy of ‘The Kite Runner’ looks battered, not because it’s well-thumbed but because I’ve been using it as a laptop stand for years. I have now swapped it out and added it to my reading pile!