A Thousand Splendid Suns

[lady-jem.livejournal.com]

I'm new to this community, and was really surprised to see that no one yet had reviewed this book...(at least, it's not tagged under the author, which I admit is where I looked...)

So: 1. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. His second novel, after The Kite Runners, which I have not read yet but which a few others on this community have read and reviewed.

The novel is set in Afghanistan (Herat for the first part, and mostly Kabul thereafter) and follows the lives of two women set against Afghanistan from the seventies through the early 21st century--the book moves through the Soviet occupation, the Mujahadin, the Taliban, and eventually their defeat and the rebuilding of the city, but it tells of it all from the perspective of women living in Kabul trying to survive and raise their families...I will also say that it was one of the first books I've cried over in probably a decade. 

One other reviewer gently criticized Hosseini's first book for presenting a somewhat skewed, Westernized (or propagandized) view of Afghanistan and the happenings there; I freely admit that my knowledge of the politics and the time is weak, but I thought this was a lovely book and it rang very true and believable to me.  The "voice" of the story reminded me somehow of The Red Tent, though I'm not exactly sure why and the two books really don't have much in common. But I personally found this male author's representation of women's character and heart to be very convincing. (To my surprise, actually!)  And I will definitely read this one again.

(Next up: Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan) (edit: which, if the dead socialite doesn't stop rambling about her own funeral and other stuff so we can get to the story, I won't get far on...this is SLOW going. And I'm sorry, but when an author tells you right up front what the story is going to be about, she's sort of made a contract with you wherein there are only so many pages you're going to read before you expect to go somewhere with the actual story she promised you...)

Comments

[yasaman.livejournal.com]

As a different perspective on Hosseini's "Westernized" view and portrayal of Afghanistan: as an Afghan-American myself, I saw it more in terms of the Afghan diaspora's often mixed feelings about Afghanistan. Like, IMO, The Kite Runner has a much less hopeful view of Afghanistan's future in a way that's really characteristic of a certain part of the middle/upper class Afghan diaspora. My family ran/runs in some of the same circles as Hosseini's (in Afghanistan and in the US), so I found his vaguely pessimistic attitude pretty familiar. That's not to say it can't be or isn't westernized as well, just that the portrayal comes from a much more personal place than I think some critics realize. In many ways, I think The Kite Runner is a book about coming to terms with the despair of the diaspora WRT their feelings about the "mother country", and its solution is to look for hope in the new home country, in the west. Whereas A Thousand Splendid Suns reads to me as a much more hopeful view of Afghanistan's future, one that focuses on renewal and rebirth from within Afghanistan itself. Which is why I liked it a lot more, even if it broke my heart just as much. :) Anyway, the main difference I see between Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns (besides, y'know, all of the plot stuff) is that KR is, emotionally speaking, a book written in exile and about exile, while ATSS is a book of the diaspora.

Um, sorry if that's tl;dr but I wrote a paper comparing the two books for my Persian class, so I couldn't help but chime in.