A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini

“From darkness to light.”

For my first choice as an adult reader, I had the fortune to stumble across Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a beautiful, brutal book about clinging to moments of joy in Afghanistan’s bleak history.  I next read Anthony Doerr’s mesmeric All the Light We Cannot See and have not looked back on my relationship with reading since.

Hosseini returns to his ancestral lands in A Thousand Splendid Suns, this time charting women’s oppression in Afghanistan from the end of the 1970s through the then-present 2007.  He shows us unfolding gender-based horror within shifting power structures, from the Soviet-backed Communist government, to CIA-supplied Mujahedeen factions, to the Taliban, to the post-9/11 American-sponsored warlord coalition.  The title comes from seventeenth-century poet Saib-e-Tabrizi, who wrote of the capital city Kabul, “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, / Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”  The torments of Hosseini’s tale coalesce into an allegory of Afghanistan itself.

A Thousand Splendid Suns centers on the relationship between two women.  Mariam grows up in a mud hut on the outskirts of Herat, which in turn lies in the middle of nowhere.  She lives with her mother, who suffers from jinn possession, though western doctors might also refer to her condition as “epilepsy.”  Mariam can only see her father once a week, because his three wives have ostracized the cleaning lady (Mariam’s mother), who birthed his harami daughter.  The much younger Laila, in contrast, comes from Kabul, where she adores her father, a shy pedagogue who never regains the thread of his life after the Communists expel him from teaching, and whose mother also suffers from mental illness.  Laila worships her childhood friend, Tariq, who has one leg and protects her from boys who shoot urine-filled water guns on her hair.

Hosseini makes a intriguing choices regarding structure.  Third-person throughout, Part I follows Mariam as the POV character.  Part II sets up Laila’s backstory.  Part III operates according to a standard romance arc for Mariam and Laila’s (nonromantic) relationship.  After meeting FMC 1 in Part I and FMC 2 in Part II, Part III goes from “adhesion” (Mariam and Laila both acquiesce to arranged marriages to the same tyrannical shoemaker, decades their senior) and progress from mutual hatred to love for each other, with gut-wrenching turns along the way.  Part III also adopts a “dueling POV” format, a mainstay of romance narration, alternating between Mariam and Laila’s experiences.  Part IV pans out to third-person omniscient, and functions as an extended denouement.

A Thousand Splendid Suns adheres to a singular theme, which Mariam’s mother articulates at the end of Chapter One, “Learn this and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.  Always.  You remember that, Mariam.”  Ye gods, signposting!  See how easy?  To paraphrase Saints Strunk and White, assume that your readers flounder, so throw them a line.  They’ll love you for it.

In developing the theme of enduring, the book takes the precept of inshallah (“God willing”) to its logical extreme.  Allah alone decides fate, so the individual will to act, an ideal the West fetishizes, in radical Islam constitutes hubris. The immutability of fate figures all the more for women, who can only hope to endure their misfortunes.  Thus, the sanctity of suffering operates as a corollary to the primary takeaway, which makes A Thousand Splendid Suns a tough read.

Let me underscore this point.  I don’t know if I can recommend this book due to the extremity of its depictions of violence against women.  Granted, given the reality of the plight of women under the Taliban, the difficulty of the subject matter perhaps counts as the reason why we should all read it.  By “difficult,” however, I mean not just seeing Islamic radicals shutting down schools for girls while making them wear burqas, but scenes like a husband forcing his wife to eat rocks until her molars break because he does not like her rice.  In another scene, a mother undergoes a c-section without anesthesia due to lack of funding for medical care for women.  Depictions of unrelenting gender-based crimes against humanity could be triggering for any reader.  If you have a history of domestic violence in your own biography, please consider speaking to someone you trust, such a counselor, before opening the pages of this book.

Also, bear in mind that bearded men making rationalizations for acts of gender-based terror make for easy targets of ridicule as brutes moving fearlessly forward into the fourteenth century.  However.  Before we feel too smug about the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism, let’s keep in mind that all three Abrahamic religious traditions espouse (so to speak) patriarchal histories of oppression.  The English expression “rule of thumb,” after all, provided permission for husbands to beat their wives so long as the object they used did not exceed the width of their largest finger.

For that matter, consider the present moment in the west. Today, one-in-three women (35.6%) experience domestic violence during their lives in the United States (and one-in-four men, 28.5%).  For some reason, Oklahoma holds the dubious distinction of having the highest prevalence of violence, with a horrific 49.1% of women suffering some of form attack from their partners (and 40.7% of men).  Whatever you think about tribal Afghanistan, reflect on the fact that a woman dies at the hands of someone she loved in Oklahoma every five days.  Moreover, if you think that autocratic theocracy cannot establish itself in America, for the love of the goddess, please educate yourself on Project 2025, and in particular, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for the first 180 days of a new reactionary administration, with many former (and perhaps future) Trump administration officials as authors.

Okay, that’s a lot.  The book itself?  Incredible.  Hosseini’s writing proves nothing less than a masterclass.  Literary theorist Edward Said coined the term “orientalism” to refer to a set of tropes regarding the “east” that have more to do with projections of western fantasy than the actual people who live in lands from the Middle East to Japan (think Disney’s Aladdin, for example).  Hosseini’s painterly descriptions suggest that Afghanis can fall into orientalist dreams of their own.  The food references alone make the book worth reading.  Simmering kormas.  Tandoori oven-baked bread.  Rosewater ice cream.  Kebabs of all kinds.  Sticky rice balls with creamy spinach sauce.  Five-hundred-year-old pistachio trees under whose shade medieval poets penned their verses, incongruous icons amidst the rubble of bombed-out urban centers.  Are you kidding?  I want to see these places.  I want a future in which I can visit these landscapes.

Critics tend to focus on flaws, myself included, yet know that A Thousand Splendid Suns belongs on any “best of” list for contemporary novels.  Every event in the story serves to move the plot forward, each shift of circumstances a setup for a future fall.  You feel like a boxer who keeps getting up only to receive the next blow, but you can never contradict Hosseini’s gifts in the telling. Let me also praise Hosseini for his real-world leadership work for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in addition to the consciousness-raising that his fiction has accomplished.

I do have some stylistic quibbles if this had been my book (which it is not).  Like everyone else, Hosseini employs passive voice.  He makes regular use of the Unforgivable It (“It was Aziza who led the family in prayers.”).  He also makes an authorial choice to introduce dozens of foreign terms with “[X, Y]” constructions like, “‘It’s true that these boys have no risha, no roots,’ Rasheed said.”  The technique works, but the convention of translating terms for characters who after all speak the same language (but really for our benefit), highlights the artifice of storytelling.

I would also risk broaching the eternal, fraught debate between those who read books as discrete objects versus those who argue for placing them in context.  A Thousand Splendid Sun’s conclusion, while not quite a Happy Ever After, nevertheless delivers an antidote of redemption for both the characters as well as the city of Kabul.  At the time of the book’s publication in 2007, the Taliban had fled to the mountains.

After America’s Saigon-like withdrawal (and much like the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan) since that time, however, the radicals have come back.  The Taliban, despite promises to the contrary, have once again banned education for girls over the age of twelve.  They have also reinaugurated public administration of punishment, including execution, in football stadia.  The rays of optimism at the end of the book during Kabul’s brief period of rebirth seem cruel with the benefit of hindsight after its publication. Predicting the future seems too much to ask of any author, but the subsequent reestablishment of the old ways undercuts the hopeful tone Hosseini wants to end with.

For the thousand-and-first time, the sun sets on Kabul, illuminating the landscape in a light of breathtaking beauty, before plunging its people into the terror of darkness.