Thousand Splendid Suns Book Review

SUNDAY, 20 JANUARY 2008 17:15 SHAAN RIZVI

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Author: Khaled Hosseini With the publication of his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini continues to pave the path he started on with this popular first novel, The Kite Runner, and has left another indelible mark on the American imagination of life in Afghanistan under Soviet and Taliban rule. His most recent fictional novel is a story of two girls, Maryam and Laila, who grow up in different regions of Afghanistan Maryam in Herat and Laila in Kabul. While Maryam is older than Laila, their lives are brought together by fate as they end up living together in the same home in Kabul, married to the same abusive husband. Throughout the course of the novel, Khaled Hosseini guides us through over forty years of Maryam and Laila's lives, masterfully weaving their personal narratives into the backdrop of Afghanistan's turbulent recent history. On the basis of only the storyline, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a literary marvel. Hosseini has a gift for descriptive writing; the portraits of the culture and lifestyle of Afghanistan that he paints are exquisitely detailed and bring the pages to life. Moreover, he does a wonderful job of developing his characters and creates reader-sympathy for them by allowing the reader to become intimately acquainted with their lives. The friendship that blossoms between Maryam and Laila is heart-warming; their relationship with their abusive husband is tragic; Laila's distressed life and her longing for her childhood best-friend, Tariq, is hopeful. In this story, Hosseini displays his masterful understanding of human emotions, and slowly and beautifully draws these emotions forth from the reader throughout the course of the story. Furthermore, it was heartening to read a novel that delineated certain subtleties of Muslim culture, especially those relating to inter-gender relations or respect for elders. On the basis of its social and political commentary, however, A Thousand Splendid Suns was disappointing. First, to give credit to Hosseini, it was shocking to see the way in which Rasheed, the novel's primary antagonist, physically, mentally, and emotionally abused his wives, Maryam and Laila, over the course of many years. There is no question that such behavior treatment of one's spouse is completely unacceptable in Islam. There is also no doubt that such abusive relationships still exist amongst Muslim couples, which is condemnable. Yet, for the nonMuslim reader, Rasheed's relationship with his wives likely reinforced negative impressions they may have had of the status of women in Islam and of Muslim women being oppressed and subject to abuse at the hands of Muslim men. In his one-sided portrayal, Hosseini failed to show his readers the other side of the coin: the countless number of Muslim couples who live happily and harmoniously according to Islamic principles and show genuine affection toward one another. Additionally, throughout the novel Hosseini paints a very bleak portrait of the ruling Taliban regime, which, in the mind of the non-Muslim reader, is likely to be the manifestation of true Islam in practice. The Taliban regime goes so far as to ban any and all art forms they considered deviant and to prohibit women from working.

Reading the novel drove home the point that as Shia Muslims, we are fortunate to have leaders who have a much greater respect and reverence for women; Imam Khomeini, for instance, made several speeches throughout his life on the significant role of women in the development of healthy human beings and healthy societies, as well as their crucial role in the Islamic Revolution. In a May 1979 speech, he proclaimed, Women are human beings, great human beings. Women are the educators of society.A country's success or its misfortune depends on women. If they impart sound teachings, they create (sound) human beings and a flourishing country." Imam Khomeini also went on to declare that in the Islamic Republic, women would be able to participate in elections and run for office, which is a significant improvement in comparison with their rights under the Taliban regime. Hence, the problem with Hosseini's novel is that once again, we see that Islam painted by one broad, misleading brushstroke. In an interview with Bloomsbury magazine, Hosseini stated, "I want to distance myself from the notionthat the West can and should exert pressure on these countries to grant women equal rights. Though I think this is a well-intended and even noble idea, I see it as too simplistic and impractical. This approach either directly or indirectly dismisses the complexities and nuances of the target society as dictated by its culture, traditions, customs, political system, social structure, and overriding faith. I believe change needs to come from within, that is, from a Muslim societys own fabric." Yet, given that Hosseini believes that "change must come from within," his one-dimensional and biased portrayals of Muslim women and the Muslim lifestyle do a disservice to Islam, and areespecially dangerous at a time when there is already so much baseless propaganda against Islam abound in the media and when various institutions in the United States are trying to sell the idea of a war on Iran to the larger American population. Given the current discourse on the role of women in Islam, Hosseini should have been much more discerning in choosing how to depict his female characters. Hosseini's novels are popular amongst American readers, as is evidenced by the fact that The Kite Runner is now a major motion picture. However, with blatantly biased depictions of Islam, A Thousand Splendid Suns is likely to contribute to the negative stereotypes and misunderstanding of Islam that is already prevalent in American media and culture. Despite the efforts of our brothers and sisters across the country who are working diligently to clarify such misunderstands, Hosseini's novel added to our burden. He added to the burden faced by Muslim sisters to prove that they are dressing moderately out of their own free will, and he added to the burden on Muslim brothers to reverse incorrect stereotypes of Muslim men as abusive, overly dominant and controlling. In short, we may be able to thank Mr. Hosseini for enlivening our imaginations for some time with A Thousand Splendid Suns, but we can only hope that given his current popularity, Mr. Hosseini depicts a more balanced view of Muslim culture in his next smash-hit novel.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

Everybody around me is buzzing about Khaled Hosseini's new book "And the mountains echoed" which is to be released on may 21st. So what is this all about? Should we/you be waiting for it like everybody else? I can't answer on your behlaf, but I know that I will not be waiting for this book! This post aims to explain to you why I will not also read the new book. So I have read Hossaini's two books, "The kite runner" and "A thousand splendid suns" and I can honestly say that I was disappointed, twice. I have read "The kite runner" a long time ago which means that I don't see myself fit to review it, so here's instead my review of "A thousand splendid suns" which is the reason that made me make up my mind not to read the third book by the author.

Firt thing I would like to mention is that this book was a Christmas

gift from my two favorite tutorial students ever. I loved the gift more than anything in the whole world and I loved reading the book because it was from them. But when it comes to reviews, I have to be objective and straight forward so here it goes. There are two things that I liked about this book: the title and the cover page image, although the author is not to be credited for the latter one. Annoying thing however, was that I didn't see at all how the cover image related to the story. Is there a reason why this image was chosen paticularly??? I don't know for sure, but I believe that this choice was bad from an intellectual perspective because one cannot relate it later to the book. Maybe it doesn't matter to you, but I feel that if one really cares about his book, at least he should have the decency to make an effort to choose an appropriate image that relates to the story and not any stereotypic one, an image that will just do.

To be really fair, I did like one more thing about this book: The protagonists are women and they are themselves telling their stories. I believe for a male writer to speak in the words of a woman is very hard, especially because one has to think like a woman to know what she would say and men usually can never do that :D (right ladies?). However, I found the writer to be very successful in his task, in his double difficult task one should say, since he did speak in the words of two women and not only one and did it in a very good way.

Briefly, (as usual meaning this won't be so brief :D, at all!) the story tells the life events of two girls with a large age difference having very different characters and completely different backgrounds. The older girl is forced to marry a widow that is a bit older than her. Several years later, the younger girl is also forced to marry him too. The man is an asshole to say the least. At the end, the man is killed by mistake, one of the girls sacrifices herself and the other finds happiness, leaves the country and returns several years later to do just charitable work and remembers her good old friend.

In this book, we do not only follow the adventures of the Afghani protagonists, we find ourselves taken in a descripticve and historical trip which retraces in details the culure of this country, the destructive war, the warlords and the misery etc. However, the style used to convey the story was very ordinary, the events were very predictable (I did predict one of the girl's mom's suicide, that the boyfriend of the other girl was not killed as she had thought, that the girls escaping the horrible husband are gonna get caught etc). One major issue for me (and this is very personal) was that the book lacked music. I can't remember at all a single quote about music anywhere (or about books as a matter of fact). Knowing that I PERSONALLY really enjoy books that introduce me to new music or litterature works, "A thousand splendid suns" failed to personally please me or at least mark me. I usually mark the pages that I find really good while reading, so that sometimes my books look more like accordons than anything else :D. However, the only page that I marked in this whole book was the one where we learn about how the book got its name.

From a technical perspectve, there was nothing creative in this book and I noticed a lot of similarities with the author's first one. Hosseini has a very clear pattern in writing: He writes about harsh subjects (war related atrocious death accidents, marriage to teens, revolution, violence, martyr etc) Also, in both books you have the character leaving the country and coming back to remember the sacrifice of a very honorable dead friend. Some of this stuff is defenitely real, but I never enjoy real books and I always say that if I want such stuff, I'd just read the newspaper or a scholar book. The creativity and the style are very important to me. The shocking truth affects me in real life but never in books. I hate when a book's strength is only based on how horrible the events it describes are!!! And this is what the book is only about. There was no magic in it and I demand MAGIC!

For all of the above, I hereby declare that unless you convince me that the new book is really different from the two previous ones, I shall not read it!