A Thousand Splendid Suns - Book Review

Tears coalesce somewhere in your eye sockets as you rush your sight across the peaks and valleys of Hosseini’s emotionally charged landscape of fear, terror, pity and plight in his 2007 novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Yes, believe it or not, your resistance to all inner urges to weep will stand no chance against this massive appeal to cry over the predicament of women in Afganistan in general, and that of Mariam and Laila in particular.

An instant sense of foreboding clasps your nerves just a few pages down this terrain, and then there is no coming back for sure; you feel a polite but firm grip of the narrative in favour of the first female character, Marim unequivocally termed ‘harami’, an illegimate child of Jalil, a cinema owner in the city of Herat. Her mother, Nana, used to work at Jalil’s home as a maid until she was discovered pregnant with his child and later ousted from this household to live in a dingy hut Jalil constructed for her in the outskirst of the city to avoid her confrontation with his other three legitimate wives and nine children.

Since Mariam’s birth in 1969, till her fifteenth birthday, Jalil remains a regular visitor to his daughter and her embittered mother, every Thursday. Whereas Mariam yearns for these weekly visits anxiously, her mother loathes them outright discounting the acceptance for monthly ration dispensed to them as recompense to their illegitimacy of relationship. Despite Nana’s recurrent fears that she may lose her only child to Jalil’s fatherly affections, Mariam ends up landing at Jalil’s doorstep when he fails to turn up on her fifteenth birthday as promised. Denied entrance at Jalil’s home on the pretext that he was out on a business trip, she spends the whole night outside the gate, and upon realizing that Jalil was home, returns to her hut baffled and dismayed. Nana, on the other hand believing that Mariam has left her, hangs herself to death.

 

From this point on, Hosseini tightens the emotional tangle around this unfortunate teen, who after a short stay at Jalil’s home is hurriedly married to Rasheed, a shoe maker from Kabul, 20 years older than her. After a couple of caesareans and miscarriages, she becomes a victim of Rasheed’s intermittent tortures. Her predicament embitters when Rasheed marries Laila, the only survivor of a recent shelling at her home which claims her parents’ lives, and whose brothers have already died fighting for mujahideens. Overlooking 30 years of age gap with Rasheed, Laila approves this marriage with him to hide the fact that she is pregnant with Tariq’s child, her lover, because Rasheed somehow makes her believe that Tariq is dead while crossing the border into Pakistan. In due course she gives birth to a daughter, Aziza and a couple of years later to a boy, Zalmai. Mariam, at first weary of these intruders who, she believes, have infringed upon her territory, finally makes peace with them. However the usual erratic treatment from Rasheed ultimately brings Mariam and Laila into a mother-daughter bond.

 

Hosseini’s art in capturing and then sustaining the emotional suspension comes discreetly evidenced in his description of these two women in trouble. Direly at the mercy of this daunting male, their lot looks pathetically way less than that of a house cat. Their misery throbs through the text till it leaves a lump in your throat and tears well up in your eyes. Distraught by the agony of having to live off the scrapes of existence, they conjure up a redemption plan, whereof mariam kills Rasheed in an attempt to rescue Laila whom he is about to strangle to death.

Mariam helps Laila peel out to Pakistan to reunite with Tariq, and later gets executed by Taliban confessing to the murder of her husband. Hosseini masterfully weaves this feminine tale of trouble and tribulation across a multigenerational period of over 40 years, and never once throughout the narrative do you feel yourself dissociated from the phenomenal pain brewing up page after page. Laila’s return to her homeland with her family and her midway stopover at Herat to pay a homage visit to Mariam’s hut is accorded with such subtle narration by the author that it wrings the last reserves of salt from your eyes while your chest heaves with sobs like hell.

Unlike its predecessor, The Kite Runner, which is a father and son story, The Thousand Splendid Suns is a mother-daughter tale of an incessant interplay of emotions and pathos actualized by women’s perseverance to steal a sense of identity in an unforgiving world of misogynist weirdo beardo males.