This is my first novel by Hosseini, and without a shadow of a doubt, Hosseini can write and can write well. Having seen The Kite Runner, I had inklings about what the story of A Thousand Splendid Suns might be. It should be emotional and about Afghanistan... but nevertheless, overwhelmingly tragic.
"There's only one, only one skill a woman like you and me needs in life, and they don't teach it at school... Only one skill. And it's this: endure."
The book traces the story of two main characters, Mariam and Laila, and how they endure the adversities of life in Afghanistan (from surviving the Soviet invasion to the chaos of Islamic militias to the arrival of the Taliban).
In essence, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a political critique (that sounds at times personal) of militant Islam's presence in Afghanistan and its impact on its people, most especially on women: how it crushes their dreams of being someone of some importance to society, how it isolates them and pushes them deeper in burrows in a world like Orwell's 1984 with all the constant "It's haram. It's taboo. It's forbidden", how it keeps reminding them that the sole reason for their existence is to be breeding machines and nothing more...
"In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too has had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed."
In my opinion, this is exactly the fault in Hosseini's manner of writing, and why it prevented me from giving the book five stars. In general, the way he wrote felt 'directed', 'two dimensional', and involved 'omission'. In this book, he pushes the liberal western narrative to the max and presents Muslims as backward, women-slaving warlords who know nothing but either 'get laid or get slain' in the name of their creed. Perhaps, I'm overreacting. But could you blame me (as a clueless-about-Islam reader) when I got my impression of it from a misogynist, polygenous, pedophilic, wife-beating character called Rasheed? I thought so, because Hosseini didn't show us another good character who could present real Islam without marring its picture except for a tiny, tiny side character. I bet Hosseini wanted to promote a book in Western societies that knew nothing about Islam or cared about only cementing a certain stereotype of it... and it paid him off. That's why his biased narrative is criminally catastrophic. Just because certain groups misinterpret their own religion does not mean the whole thing is a bad apple.
On the other hand, it would be criminally unfair to overlook the strengths of the book and what made it a powerful cry for the oppressed. The prose is simple and without exaggeration, peppered with political milestones (which I appreciated because I didn't know anything about the history of Afghanistan). The main characters, Mariam and Laila, are believable. Some reviewers argue that they're 'victim bespoke characters', meaning they are superficial and made specifically to seize readers' sympathies. I believe they're a great example of 'dynamic characters'. Just like a river, they are constantly changing and adapting and retaliating.
"A woman who will be a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her."
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Summary:
The book is good when it comes to human misfortune and the struggle to have decent human rights, but it blocks the other voices. In other words, it dictates how we should feel about what we read, and leaves no room for actually using our minds as readers and judging things and people for what they really are.
