A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS Khaled Hosseini Bloomsbury NZ$38

This is the title I read over the weekend and earlier today reviewed on Radio New Zealand National. My comments here are somewhat fuller than time allowed for on that broadcast.

Khaled Hosseini is of course the author of the hugely successful first novel, The Kite Runner, the book which in the US alone sold over 4 million copies. He was born in Kabul, Afghanistan the son of a diplomat and high school teacher. At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 his father was working at the Afghani embassy in Paris and the family sought political asylum in the US where the author was educated.

This book , like its predecessor, is also set in Afghanistan, and it also gives the reader an inside look at the enormous difficulties of living there over the past three decades under the various regimes that have ruled – Soviets, warlords, Taliban etc. Another similarity between the two books is the presence of a very unpleasant villain and a truly wonderful, almost saintly best friend.
However that is where the similarities stop because whereas the first novel featured fathers and sons and friendships between men, this new novel features mothers and daughters and friendships between women. In fact if you had to sum the story up in a few words you could say that it is a story that focuses on the plight of Afghani women.

It covers the period from about 1970 to the present day and particularly it is about two girls, Mariam and Laila, whom we meet as children, one growing up in Herat and the other in Kabul. As women they become friends when they end up being both married to the same man. Their husband Rasheed is the villain in this story and a very nasty piece of work he proves to be. I think he is probably the most repulsive male I have come across in modern fiction in many a year.

There is much death & loss and unimaginable grief in the book which of course reflects life in Afghanistan, especially for women, over these years. One cannot say too much about it without giving away the story but I have to say I was moved by it, and often while reading it felt greatly saddened.

There is something of a history lesson within the novel with the various regime changes, names of commanders, human rights abuses etc all being accurate although it is not overdone. They had a particularly tough time under the Taliban regime and I was interested to read a report in the New Zealand Herald today (June 5) where in Gaza an extremist Islamic group has told women working in television to wear veils and full religious garb on air or they will be beheaded. That is the sort of approach that the Taliban immediately introduced when they took power in Afghanistan. Only it was much, much worse, women were forbidden to do work of any kind, they were not allowed to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male member of their family, they were not allowed to speak unless spoken to, they were not allowed to laugh in public, and girls were forbidden from attending school. The punishment for women committing adultery was death by stoning.
But these historical aspects of the novel are cleverly intertwined with the family stories taking place and you are only aware of them as they affect family life.

I recommend AThousand Splendid Suns to everyone who enjoyed The Kite Runner. It is hard to out down, it is a love story and a story of sisterhood and at the same time it is the story of the past 30 years of turbulent history in a country that still does not know peace. I found myself totally engrossed throughout but be warned it is utterly heartbreaking in parts

Footnote:

The title of the novel comes from a 17th century Persian poet and Laila’s father quotes two lines from that poem as his farewell ode to Kabul:

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide beneath her walls.”