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A Thousand Splendid Suns

By Khaled Hosseini, reviewed by Joan Smith

From The Times May 19, 2007

BY THE END OF KHALED Hosseini’s new novel the residents of Kabul are picking themselves up again after the defeat of the Taleban. Unlike Hosseini’s best-selling debut The Kite Runner, which gradually turned into a novel about exile, A Thousand Splendid Suns is set almost exclusively in Afghanistan; it tells the story of two women who are unable to get out of the country when it is torn apart by the Russian invasion and civil war.

Mariam and Laila are trapped in Kabul by a succession of conflicts and the brutal patriarchy that predates them. The novel offers extraordinarily harrowing insights into the lives of Afghan women over the past three decades, suggesting that the men and boys who left the country – Hosseini’s focus in The Kite Runner– were the lucky ones, even if they found it difficult to adjust to the loss of status and material possessions.

Mariam’s problems begin long before the Soviet invasion, when her wealthy father marries her off to Rasheed, an ignorant and violent man who lives in a poor area of Kabul. Rasheed does not mind that Mariam is illegitimate; middle-aged himself, he is delighted to have a young bride and the chance of a son to replace a child who died through his negligence.

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In A Thousand Brilliant Suns, Hosseini is not just more assured, although this feels like the work of a much more accomplished writer. If he cut his teeth by writing about his countrymen, it is the plight of Afghanistan’s women that has brought him to realise his full powers as a novelist.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article1807673.ece