Hosseini does it again
Author of ‘The Kite Runner’ pens ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’

by Joe Foster

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead Books 384 pages 2007

The big literary event of the season is happening right now. Well, actually, the BIG event is Harry Potter at the end of July, but this one qualifies as pretty darn big. Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, has a new book out. If you’re a reader, and hopefully you are, then you have most likely experienced Hosseini’s story-telling powers in his first book. To be fair, I felt The Kite Runner was an excellent, but by no means perfect, book, and while it got a little too neatly tied up in the end for me, by and large I loved it. I stayed up until the wee hours reading it all in one sitting, and was appropriately moved to eye-wetness on numerous occasions throughout the story. That said, I have to say that this new book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is better. Hosseini has proven that he has the staying power, given time, to become one of the greats.

I was fortunate enough to be at Book Expo America (BEA) in New York a few weeks ago and was able to see Hosseini on a panel with Lisa See, Ken Burns and yes, it’s true, Stephen Colbert. Colbert acted as the Master of Ceremonies for the event, so it was humor–charged, which acted as a nice balance given that each of the three other authors are pretty intense: See writes of the plight of women in China; Burns blew me away pushing his forthcoming documentary about World War II; and Hosseini spoke of the culture of misogyny of his home country of Afghanistan. Khaled gave Colbert crap for not having read The Kite Runner, which made Colbert afraid that he’d have a mob of middle-aged book group women on his lawn bearing torches and cheap white wine. Ah, the silliness.

Anyway, the nicest thing about seeing Hosseini speak was seeing first hand what a genuinely passionate guy he really is. He retains a huge amount of love for his native home, while remaining painfully aware of its shortcomings. He’s pretty much what you would expect, having read him. Humble, intelligent, passionate and surprisingly witty. It was a treat to see him.

This new book follows the lives of two Afghani women, two very different women, who end up being bound together through marriage. One woman, the illegitimate daughter of a prominent and wealthy businessman, is raised by her mother in a shack on the outskirts of the city, her very existence a painful reminder of her father’s shameful lack of control. He loves her and treats her as well as he thinks he can under the circumstances. His truly shameful act, though, is the degree to which he neglects her. She is eventually sold into marriage to a much older man, a traditionalist, and her life of uneducated servitude continues.

The other woman is much younger, beautiful, educated, in love, and raised by her progressive and educated parents who are intent that she should grow into a powerful woman capable of changing things in Kabul, of helping all of Afghanistan. Her childhood is in no way idyllic, her older brothers were killed fighting the Russians, martyrs for their country, and their loss destroyed her mother. Her father lacks the strength to carry the weight of the family’s needs on his own shoulders, and so this young woman is left to largely fend for herself, but with access to an education and books, the combination of which created a strongly independent heroine in control of her own destiny.

Until…

There is of course, always something that happens. And what could it be? Kabul in the ’80s: warring factions, side-swapping traitorous generals, and Russian invaders, oh my. Kabul becomes a city in which flying rockets shatter entire neighborhoods, shot seemingly at whim, destroying lives to no purpose. Random gunfire, trucks full of bearded men seeking a reason to kill passersby, women beaten for not wearing burqas, killed for being out after curfew. Kabul becomes hell, but almost nothing compared to the hell that our two heroines, now married to the same man, must endure every day. He’s a bit of a stereotype, in my opinion, in his violence and arrogance and the ways in which his own fear feeds the violence he visits on his wives. To be fair, however, stereotypes usually exist for a reason.

These two women initially despise each other, one hating the other for witnessing their degradations, and hating the fact that they must vie for the affections of a man they hate and fear because the affections are better than the beatings. Over time they grow to love each other, and the children they eventually share. Their friendship becomes the rock they survive upon and becomes the vehicle for their deliverance.

The characters are poignant, and the historical details are enthralling. Hosseini has done it again, creating a literary juggernaut that will once again sweep the country, and yes, especially wine-sipping book groups. •