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Mariam is born an illegitimate child in Herat when her father Jalil has an affair with his housekeeper Nana. Since then her existence is kept secret from the high society her father belongs in. When Nana commits suicide and Jalil has no choice but to take Mariam in, his three wives quickly come up with a plan to marry her off, at age 15, to a middle-aged widower and business owner in Kabul named Rasheed. With no other options open to her, Mariam lives as a battered wife after several miscarriages deem their marriage fruitless. Laila is born a few years after Mariam moves in with Rasheed. The daughter of their neighbors Hakim and Fariba, Laila grows up educated and strong-willed, quite the opposite of Mariam. She finds a brother in Tariq, a friend of hers who lost one leg to a landmine, after both of her brothers leave to fight in the Afghan-Soviet War. A tragedy will turn Laila into an orphan, and her path will cross with that of Mariam’s.
My expectations were low because how rare is an author who can evade a sophomore slump? It doesn’t help that Hosseini’s debut, The Kite Runner, was universally applauded by many bibliophiles. How do you come up with a sequel that could measure up to that? The only post-2000 author I know who managed to do so was Viet Thanh Nguyen with his The Sympathizer/The Committed combo. Luckily, Khaled knows what he is doing. Instead of coming up with a sequel, he opted to tell the same story of Afghanistan, but through different eyes. The Kite Runner was about two men; A Thousand Splendid Suns is headlined by two women.
Since the author’s style of storytelling is basically the same, A Thousand Splendid Suns sometimes feels like a loose sequel to The Kite Runner. To be honest, the term “sequel” is rather inappropriate here because more than anything the two books are complementary. He could have easily weaved the two separate storylines together and created set pieces where the characters from both could have interacted. After all, those characters all move around Afghanistan, particularly in Kabul, through the same period from the arrival of the Shorawi up to post 9/11 American intervention. Talking about crossovers, are there some?
Some pundits online claim that Zaman, the guy who owns the orphanage where The Kite Runner’s Sohrab and A Thousand Splendid Suns’ Aziza both spend some time of their lives, is the same guy. The names match, even though my recollection of the character from The Kite Runner is that of a much shadier guy. In any case, incidental or not, the author does not expound on this, which is also a good decision on his part given how A Thousand Splendid Suns can completely stand on its own without piggybacking on The Kite Runner’s success. Even then, it’s not hard to imagine the characters from both books existing within the same universe.
What fascinates me about this novel is the backdrop of real historical events, pretty much the same way The Kite Runner was conceptualized. The novel was published in 2007 during the country’s time under the Americans. At the end of the novel, Laila and her family return to Kabul to start their life anew, filled with hope. Of course, we know that the country fell to the Taliban once again in 2021. Maybe that’s just one of the unintentional bonuses of writing a novel operating within the realms of developing real-life events. It makes you imagine how life would once again change for these characters, almost two decades later.
The author has always indicated in interviews that he wanted a feminine perspective for this novel, probably a story similar to The Kite Runner but through the female gaze. It’s nothing short of amazing how he manages to come up with a new storyline through not just one, but two women who couldn’t be any less different in terms of belief systems and attitudes. I was thinking it would come across as fake since Hosseini is a guy, although he explains that he grew up with strong women in his life, so I guess that paid off in the end. A Thousand Splendid Suns is hard to read because of the culture shock, but Mariam and Laila’s tenacity is such a universally admirable trait that will leave any human being in awe.
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