A Thousand Splendid Suns

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS; Khaled Hosseini; Penguin; 2007; Fiction

Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns," like "The Kite Runner" before it, is both heartbreaking and heartbreakingly beautiful. Hosseini tells the story of two Afghan women--Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Kabul businessman who is married to a much older man to get her out of the household, and Laila who, through a series of disasters which you should be allowed to encounter as the story unfolds, is separated from her one true love and forced into a loveless and abusive marriage.

"A Thousand Splendid Suns" is dedicated to "the women of Afghanistan," and the text is charged with the relentless, hopeless constraint of their lives during the Soviet occupation and the reign of the Taliban. Hosseini's story is of interior lives, in both meanings of the phrase. Afghan women must physically live indoors, not allowed outside without a man, and likewise must never express their true feelings. It would seem impossible to find redemption in such lives, but redemption does come. How could we not remember these two women forever?

LW