A Thousand Splendid Suns

Yesterday I finished Khaled Hosseini's second novel A Thousand Splendid Suns. It did not disappoint. I had loved his first novel The Kite Runner and was hoping that this novel would live up to those standards. It did.

This novel starts with Miriam, a bastard child of a very wealthy man in Afghanistan. She and her mother have been given a small shack on the outskirts of town to hide her existence from her father's family. Her father (Jalil) comes to visit once a week and Miriam looks forward to this each week. Miriam's mother does not believe that this relationship is healthy because she knows that Miriam will be let down in the end. One fateful birthday, things turn bad for Miriam and she suddenly fins herself married to a man she doesn't know (Rasheed). She moves away and is forced to live a life that is less than what she imagined. Her story later interweaves with Laila, and orphaned woman and her two children.

The novel spans from 1959 (when Miriam was born) to 2003 (well after the Taliban and 9-11 rocked Afghanistan and the United States). It is interesting to get the Taliban from the Afghan perspective. It is not what I expected.

It seems that Hosseini loves the theme of friendship. Evident in his first novel with the boys and this second novel with Miriam and Laila. He also weaves unwanted (or unplanned) children into both novels. His style is beautiful and he writes page turners. I finished this novel in three days and was disappointed that I finished. It was bittersweet--I'm glad that I finished, but, at the same time, I wanted more. I am thinking of picking up The Kite Runner to read again because I want to revisit that novel.

Hoseinni is, in my humble opinion, one of this era's great novelists and we can only hope that he delivers another novel as good as his first two.