My Madapaka Sheet

A Thousand Splendid Suns Book Cover

A Thousand Splendid Suns takes us in a journey to the streets, hills and mountains of Afghanistan during the time of Soviet invasion to the emergence and supremacy of the Taliban and to post-Taliban era. The book focuses on the compelling story of two women from different generations and from different family backgrounds.

Mariam is a daughter of a wealthy cinema-owner, Jalil Khan, and a resentful mother and wife, Nana, who believes that women are scorned and that they can’t do anything about it but endure.

Laila, on the other hand, is a daughter of two loving parents. Her father, Hakim, is a teacher who, unlike Mariam’s father, believes that women should not be deprived of education, work, etc. but, instead, women should be equal to men – surpass them even. He believes that Afghanistan needs women like Laila. Her mother, Fariba, who is happy in nature in the early part of the story but later mourns because of the death of her two sons in jihad, wants to see victory of her two boys’ dream.

When a local shoemaker, Rasheed, marries both Mariam and Laila, they live together, which causes the two to clash, but later on find friendship, comfort, and happiness in each other. The two endure trials in their lives – domestic violence, hunger, famine – but as one of them dies, the other comes into full circle. She realizes that women must not remain a harami and that there is beyond cooking or attending to the children or staying home in the house. Hosseini also cleverly illustrated these hopes in the cartoon that Mariam once admired when she was still a child – Pinocchio. Just like Pinocchio, Mariam and Laila (and the Afghan women, in general) also want to be “real” and be part of society – to work, to be represented in the government, to have education, to sing and to dance without fearing of being reprimanded, to walk freely around the city, to laugh and to smile, and even to talk to others.

The first few pages of the book are a little slow-paced but Hosseini wants the reader to have a grasp of Mariam’s life first – to understand and to feel how a typical Afghan woman lives in a war-torn country. Hosseini brilliantly illustrates the situation, the plight, and the hopes of the Afghan women, from a chauvinistic society with his shifting narration between Mariam and Laila, which puts the reader in the eyes and shoes of these characters as war erupts in their country.

Overall, Khalil Hosseini ingeniously puts the life in Afghanistan under a microscope, where the lives of women, children, and even the men who are sent to war, are magnified in this novel, constantly changing lens to magnify the depth and the impact of violence and war in the lives of the people and in every shifting of the lens, a gripping story about family, friendship, politics, gender issues, love, survival, and endurance unfolds and in every unfolding, love – the love for one’s self, for your neighbor, for your children, for your husband or wife, and for your country – ultimately overpowers fear.

Definitely a must read for everybody.