DelMio Explorations

Book Basics | Media Room | Related Reading | Your Page | DelMio in Person | Interactive

A Thousand Splendid Suns/The Kite Runner

First, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. The communists took power and seized land and property from the wealthy classes. Then came the Mujahadeen, fighting a holy war against the invaders. They took Kabul, and bombs rained down on the capital for years. Then came the Taliban, with their Shari’a laws and Kalishnakovs. The Northern Alliance forced the Islamic extremists out a few years later, and now U.S. troops still roam the countryside searching for terrorists.

Afghanistan, with its rich history, has been marred in recent years by bloodshed, pain and terror. For the past hundred years, it has been a pawn for Western powers, then for its own warring factions. And always, its people are caught in the crossfire.

In his first novel The Kite Runner, and now A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini writes about the Afghans caught in the middle of a seemingly endless string of wars and battles for power.

Kite Runner tells the story of the well-off Amir and his friend and servant Hassan. One day, Amir sees Hassan brutally assaulted by a neighborhood gang and does nothing to stop it. The succeeding years bring Amir through the Communist invasion, eventually forcing him and his father to escape to the United States, but never past the overwhelming guilt he feels.

Amir gets married, and one day receives a call from his father’s old friend, with a cryptic message: “There is a way to be good again.” Amir returns to his homeland to find it destroyed by years of war, and finds the way to become good again — rescuing Hassan’s son Sohrab from the Taliban.

A Thousand Splendid Suns takes up many of the same historical events, but the new novel focuses on the plight of Afghan women throughout their country’s tumultuous recent history. Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Herat businessman, is married off to a man more than twice her age hundreds of miles away in Kabul. Her new husband, Rasheed, forces her to wear a burqa, and subjects her to ever-harsher treatment when she fails to bear him a son.

After the ensuing revolutions and invasions, Rasheed marries a second time, this time to Laila, the young next-door neighbor whose family has been killed in a rocket attack and who is already pregnant with the son of her lover, Tariq. She bears Rasheed a son, but also is subjected to the same burqa and beatings as Mariam.

Both novels paint a grim and moving picture of life in a war-torn country, and of lives lived in the face of hunger, death and a bleak future. Hosseini makes you realize that, even while bombs rain down and people are dying of hunger, people still fall in love, seek friends and, mostly, try to remain human.

Meet Khaled Hosseini