A thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

New York Times

A Woman’s Lot in Kabul, Lower Than a House Cat’s

It’s not that hard to understand why Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, “The Kite Runner” (2003), became such a huge best seller, based largely on word of mouth and its popularity among book clubs and reading groups. The novel read like a kind of modern-day variation on Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” in which the hero spends his life atoning for an act of cowardice and betrayal committed in his youth. It not only gave readers an intimate look at Afghanistan and the difficulties of life there, but it also showed off its author’s accessible and very old-fashioned storytelling talents: his taste for melodramatic plotlines; sharply drawn, black-and-white characters; and elemental boldfaced emotions.

Whereas “The Kite Runner” focused on fathers and sons, and friendships between men, his latest novel, “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” focuses on mothers and daughters, and friendships between women. Whereas “Kite Runner” got off to a gripping start and stumbled into contrivance and sentimentality in its second half, “Splendid Suns” starts off programmatically and gains speed and emotional power as it slowly unfurls.

Like its predecessor, the new novel features a very villainous villain and an almost saintly best friend who commits an act of enormous self-sacrifice to aid the hero/heroine. Like its predecessor, it attempts to show the fallout that Afghanistan’s violent history has had on a handful of individuals, ending in death at the hands of the Taliban for one character, and the promise of a new life for another. And like its predecessor, it features some embarrassingly hokey scenes that feel as if they were lifted from a B movie, and some genuinely heart-wrenching scenes that help redeem the overall story.

Mr. Hosseini, who was born in Kabul and moved to the United States in 1980, writes in straight-ahead, utilitarian prose and creates characters who have the simplicity and primary-colored emotions of people in a fairy tale or fable. The sympathy he conjures for them stems less from their personalities (the hero of “Kite Runner” was an unlikable coward who failed to come to the aid of his best friend) than from the circumstances in which they find themselves: contending with unhappy families, abusive marriages, oppressive governments and repressive cultural mores.

In the case of “Splendid Suns,” Mr. Hosseini quickly makes it clear that he intends to deal with the plight of women in Afghanistan, and in the opening pages the mother of one of the novel’s two heroines talks portentously about “our lot in life,” the lot of poor, uneducated “women like us” who have to endure the hardships of life, the slights of men, the disdain of society.

This heavy-handed opening quickly gives way to even more soap-opera-ish events: after her mother commits suicide, the teenage Mariam — the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man, who is ashamed of her existence — is quickly married off to a much older shoemaker named Rasheed, a piggy brute of a man who says it embarrasses him “to see a man who’s lost control of his wife.”

Rasheed forces Mariam to wear a burqa and treats her with ill-disguised contempt, subjecting her to scorn, ridicule, insults, even “walking past her like she was nothing but a house cat.” Mariam lives in fear of “his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not.”

The life of the novel’s other heroine, Laila, who becomes Rasheed’s second wife, takes an even sharper trajectory toward ruin. Though she is the cherished daughter of an intellectual, who encourages her to pursue an education, Laila finds her life literally shattered when a rocket — lobbed by one of the warlord factions fighting for control of Kabul, after the Soviet Union’s departure — lands on her house and kills her parents.

Her beloved boyfriend, Tariq, has already left Kabul with his family — they have become refugees in Pakistan — and she suddenly finds that she is an orphan with no resources or friends. When she discovers that she is pregnant with Tariq’s child and learns that Tariq has supposedly died from injuries sustained in a rocket attack near the Pakistan border, she agrees to marry Rasheed, convinced that she and her baby will never survive alone on the streets of Kabul.

At first Mariam sees Laila as a rival and accuses her of stealing her husband, but when Laila’s baby, Aziza, arrives, Mariam begins to soften. Gradually, she and Laila become allies, trying to shield each other from Rasheed’s rages and demands. Mariam becomes a second mother to Aziza, and she and Laila become best friends.

In the opening chapters of the book the characters are so one-dimensional that they feel like cartoons. Laila is the great beauty, with a doting father and a protective boyfriend — a lucky girl whose luck abruptly runs out. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a bitter woman and a disloyal father — an unlucky girl whose luck turns from bad to worse. And Rasheed is the evil bully, a misogynist intent on debasing his two wives.

Gradually, however, Mr. Hosseini’s instinctive storytelling skills take over, mowing down the reader’s objections through sheer momentum and will. He succeeds in making the emotional reality of Mariam and Laila’s lives tangible to us, and by conjuring their day-to-day routines, he is able to give us a sense of what daily life was like in Kabul — both before and during the harsh reign of the Taliban.

He shows us the Taliban’s “beard patrols,” roaming the streets in Toyota trucks “on the lookout for clean-shaven faces to bloody.” He shows us hospitals turning away women in labor because men and women are supposed to be seen at different hospitals. And he shows us the “ ‘Titanic’ fever” that gripped Kabul in the summer of 2000, when pirated copies of that film turned up in the city: entertainment-starved people surreptitiously dug out their TVs (which had been hidden away, even buried in backyards) and illicitly watched the movie late at night, and riverside vendors began selling Titanic carpets, Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, even Titanic burqas.

In the end it is these glimpses of daily life in Afghanistan — a country known to most Americans only through news accounts of war and terrorism — that make this novel, like “The Kite Runner,” so stirring, and that distract attention from its myriad flaws.