Title: A Thousand Splendid Suns
Author: Khaled Hosseini
Date: 2007
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 978-1-59448-950-1
Length: 372 pages including historical notes
Quote: “Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.”
According to the Bible, men have been blaming women for whatever went wrong since Adam’s last few minutes in the Garden of Eden. In this novel a male author tries to begin to apologize.
It’s Khaled Kite Runner Hosseini. Prepare to be harrowed. Most of the plot of this story unfolds inside one house. The sins of the man of this house—ironically called Rasheed, when he’s anything but “rightly guided”—at least don’t include raping children, so in this book we don’t have to read about that. We do read about violence. Rasheed is a ratbag, often grumpy and apt to blame, verbally abuse, and hit people; but until the Taliban take over he spends most of his time working, buys nice things for his family, and is only mean enough to unite everyone against him. Then his shop is blown up, the river runs dry, famine is in the land, and Rasheed seems to direct all his misery into abusing his family.
He has three wives. One had already committed suicide after his first son disgraced the family by dying drunk. At first the two who share the house resent each other. Then they become friends.
Things come to a head when the women and their two children realize just how selfish and vile Rasheed has always been. Snarling about “teamwork,” he attacks both wives and the daughter with such passionate intensity as to start a three-to-one brawl. Two members of this family, and the little boy who’s locked upstairs out of the way before the fight begins, will survive.
One of the women will get a happy ending. Sort of. If you read the novel as serious literature about the human condition, you might think of it as raising the question to what extent all of us owe our lives to the sacrifices others made, going before us.
If you read it as an Afghan speaking to his own people, you might think of it as a teaching story explaining how much harm a father’s weakness does to his daughter, providing a good model of how to apologize, and warning other neglectful fathers to seek reconciliation with their children before it’s too late. (You might even note the recent history of natural disasters, like the extreme drought in Afghanistan, in countries that have tolerated institutionalized abuses of women...God may well be pleased when people voluntarily practice chastity and modesty, but God certainly has shown no favor to Islamic countries that have dishonored the names of both virtues with abuses like those described in this book.)
If you read it as a humanitarian worker speaking to comfortable Americans, you might think of it as an appeal on behalf of Afghan war orphans and refugees. It was that, too; Hosseini was actively working with the United Nations Refugee Agency while writing this book.
This web site has recommended heavy penalties for the UN’s meddling in the sovereign self-government of member nations, but this web site agrees with Laura Ingraham: Despite what can reach epic levels of inefficiency, corruption, and confusion, the UN has been able to deliver food to orphans in war zones.
That said, this web site would also like to call the attention of those who consider themselves refugees, and those who want to try to cram more refugees into the United States in a desperate scheme to create second-class citizenship and prop up the doomed Social Security scheme, to the characterization of the refugees in this novel. Even though their lives really are in danger when they flee Kabul, even though their life as refugees is “one of comfort and tranquillity...a life to be thankful for,” “[I]t isn’t mere homesickness or nostalgia that has [her] thinking of Kabul so much these days. She has become plagued by restlessness. She hears of schools built in Kabul, roads repaired, women returning to work, and her life here...seems...insufficient to her. Inconsequential. worse yet, wasteful. Of late, she has started hearing [her father’s] voice in her head...when this war is over, Afghanistan is going to need you.”
This character has had her teeth fall out form hunger; now she’s working and getting nice halal meals every day. She’s found her first husband, long believed dead, and he’s adopted the child from her desperation marriage along with his own. Saving her wages to replace her teeth is one of the many things that might tempt her to stay in a relatively peaceful place. No such. What she wants is to use her education to help the children who are still at the orphanage where she had to abandon her own child. She is the kind of refugee who deserves the world’s help and sympathy. She was a person who deserved the help and sympathy of her own community before the disaster. After the crisis she wants to go home.
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