I am sitting now in our truck in Illinois with my daughter sleeping with damp golden curls curling around her chin, my three boys huddled over Gameboys and their faces hidden by bony shoulders, and my husband lazily chewing gum as we go down America’s freeways.  This particular moment hit me hard as I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns.  The contrasts of our peaceful drive with greenery around us and the starkness of a war-torn Afghanistan seemed particular heartfelt as I finished the novel.

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun; its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly. [pg 133]

A Thousand Splendid Suns is about a two women, Mariam and Laila, who have an unconventional friendship in modern day Kabul. Mariam is married off to an abusive man, Rasheed, by her father.  Mariam’s existence has always been full of shame as she is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man and his maid.  Laila is brought up in Kabul where she enjoyed being treated as an equal to boys and was allowed to go to school.  Eventually, war turns both Mariam and Laila’s life upside down and the only people that they have in this world is each other.

One of Hosseini’s many gifts is to turn the unimaginable into the imagined.  I was first introduced to life in Afghanistan though his first novel, The Kite Runner.  In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini has given the women in burkas a voice.  For so long, they have been faceless creatures, but their faces appeared to me as Mariam and Laila.  The problem with the burkas are two fold: one is the oppression by the Taliban and the second is that to an observer, these women do not seem like human beings with a voice.  The eyes are often the mirrors of the soul and theirs have been hidden behind a veil. Hosseini gives voices to these women.  Mariam is the docile, obedient wife who wants to please all and Laila is the independent fighter who is doing everything she can to protect her children.

An aspect of the novel that I was completely amazed with is Hosseini’s ability to capture the voice of the maternal: in Mariam, the childless mother, and Laila, the young mother.  Mariam and Laila, each in their own way, sacrifices a piece of themselves for the ones that they love.  They are not the ones who are brandishing guns and shouting war; they are the ones who pick up the pieces of damaged homes, who give up their children to orphanages so they are fed, and who silence themselves to make it to the next day.  Mariam and Laila’s story is a fictional account of the real sacrifices that women make every day during war.

Another reason why I enjoyed reading A Thousand Splendid Suns is because Hosseini eloquently recounts a modern day issue without sounding patronizing or harping.  He gets his point across by telling individual stories; as the characters become more real to us, the issues that surround them become more real to the reader.  He doesn’t need to say that what is happening in Afghanistan is wrong or that people are dying; because in individual stories, the death has occurred.  When listening to the news, I hear 50,000 people died.  That number is too large for me to comprehend.  It doesn’t take 50,000 people to die to make cause anger and outrage; all it really takes is for one persona, a sister, brother, mother, father, to tell about their heartache for their story to touch someone.

Political issues aside, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a beautifully written story about the love between two women where there should have been hate.  Again, Hosseini has crafted a gut-wrenching tale of women who have seemed to have lost everything, yet have the will to keep going.  How many of us in this same situation can say the same?  I hope I never have opportunity to know.

To learn more about how you can help Afghan refugees, visit the UN refugee agency’s site at www.unrefugees.org.

Book review written on June 30th, 2009 on my way back from Kentucky to Minnesota.  Yes, I was balling in a truck full of children and husband.  My little girl kept asking, “Mommy, what wrong?”  Nothing, honey, nothing.

Book Source: Purchased from Barnes & Noble.

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