A Thousand Splendid Suns

A Thousand Splendid Suns was published in 2007 by Khaled Hosseini, the same author as The Kite Runner. The title comes from a seventeenth-century Persian poem praising Kabul, describing a city so beautiful that a thousand splendid suns hide behind its walls. The book draws a painful contrast between that imagined beauty and the reality its heroines live.

The story covers about thirty years of Afghan history, from the mid-1970s to the first years after 2001, passing through the coup, the Soviet invasion, the civil war, Taliban rule, and the fall of the regime. Everything is seen through two women of different generations who would never have met outside these circumstances.

It is a heavy read, with scenes of domestic violence and war. If you are going through a delicate time, it's worth reading carefully and in small doses.

The first heroine is Mariam, born around 1959 near Herat, in western Afghanistan. She is the daughter of Nana, a housekeeper, and Jalil, a wealthy man who owns the town's movie theater and has three wives and many legitimate children. Because she was born outside of marriage, she is called a harami, a bastard, and carries the stigma of that word her whole life.

Mariam lives with her mother in an isolated shack on the edge of a hill, and Nana keeps repeating that the world is cruel to women and that their only strength is to endure. Even so, Mariam loves Thursdays, when Jalil visits, brings gifts, and tells stories. She wants to believe she is loved, even though her father never takes her to his big house.

It's a pain many people recognize: the child who idealizes the absent father because she needs him, while the wounded mother becomes the hard, bitter figure. The book shows how this tug-of-war will shape the girl's entire life.

On her fifteenth birthday, Mariam asks her father to take her to his movie theater. Jalil stalls and puts it off, and she decides to go to town on her own. She spends the night on the sidewalk in front of his house, waiting to be let in. One of her father's employees shows up and takes her back, and Jalil never comes out to see her.

When she gets home, she finds her mother dead: Nana, desperate at the thought of being abandoned by her daughter, took her own life. Mariam comes to carry the guilt of having left and of having believed in her father. It is one of the hardest moments in the book, and it explains much of how she will treat herself from then on.

Think of anyone who has spent hours at someone's door waiting for a sign and walked away with nothing. It hurts more than an honest answer. Hosseini turns that closed door into a symbol: the place where the girl discovers that the love she was waiting for came in small, conditional doses.