On a grey saturday that followed two days of the bluest sunshine, i could fancy nothing better than to sit curled up with a book, and what i happened to lay hands on was a copy of 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' by Khaled Hosseini. Kat was telling me today that she loved the Kite Runner movie, and that it would move anyone's heart. Its been a while since i read anything of the sort, and so I decided to give this second book of Hosseini's a try.
Its a book set over a period of four decades, mostly in Afghanistan, following the lives of two women and their experiences in what are clearly incredibly turbulent times. The story begins with Mariam, a child of five, and the day she heard the word 'harami', exclaimed in the bitter resentful voice of her mother. In this portion of the tale there is much scope for moral judgements and biases and all the drama that it brings along. Some of the shifts in perspective as the girl of five grows into the daughter of fifteen, and the 'crash and burn' of her life at that point when it becomes undeniably all too real, seem a tad heavy-handed, and yet they leave one with an expectant attitude towards the rest of the tale because however dramatic the narration may seem, this is not a tale of black and white convictions but rather one that promises several shades of dawning light, and one already knows its not going to be the blinding white ray of hope or happiness but rather a grudging dusty beam of grey that is yet hoarded with glee. Mariam is set up very traditionally and Laila is ebony to her ivory. The connecting point of the narrative to Laila from Mariam is also well handled i think, at the point where Mariam's house has a mysterious(not so very probably, considering the readers know its her father) car, and then we go into this entirely other world where women are treated more familiarly and yet the contrast between this and the previous setup is milked in every possible way for its poignancy i feel. Laila is instantly relatable to, and yet she is, as is everyone in this tale, surrounded by a thick mist of loss and tragedy seems to hover around her every step in a shadowy foreboding of the grim future.
The rest of the tale, once the political environment begins to take over, is really indescribable in terms of plot. I had no clear knowledge of Afghanistan's history, and the tale that one sees unfolding, is of a monarchy coming to an end to be replaced with a liberal, socially-reformative government under General Daud in '53, and then within just one decade of relative progress, troubles restart and slowly the man who brought in the reforms falls out of grace, labeled a communist and a lackey for the USSR, and effectively creates the leftist alliance that overthrows him. The role of the western world in this shifting political scape is not very clearly dealt with, but its obvious that much of this upheaval is enabled largely by the ammunition flowing into either side from their hosts in the cold war. This battle is won by the leftists and the first thing they do when faced with no external enemy is to start factioning themselves, which is a scenario tiresomely familiar to us from our own politics and up come the Mujahideen, armed to the teeth by the Americans, and garnering support amongst the people themselves who are feeling let down by all the messiahs who came charging up to release them from the iniquitous rule of their predecessors. And as history repeats itself, the Mujahideen lose credibility and up come the Taleban, and the rest, as we all can almost chant in chorus 'is history'.
I do not speak of Mariam and Laila and the others in the tale after this point because honestly, i cannot find myself caring much for their travails there on. Hosseini describes the daily routines and details of little changes in lifestyles of small and insignificant people very well, and after a point that is all that I cared about and was in thrall to, as i read on. There is this short description of the Titanic sensation that grips the nation under the no-TV ban of the Taleban that is a rare chuckleworthy moment in the book. Overall, I disagree with Isabelle Allende who, on the cover calls it 'Unforgettable' and find the Daily Telegraph's comparison of Hosseini to Dickens rather a stretch and that too in quite the wrong direction, but agree with the Literary Review that calls it an 'energetic and thought-provoking read'.
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