290- Rereading A THOUSAND SPLEDNDID SUNS by Khaled Hosseini review: “…and yet she was leaving the world and as a woman who loved and been loved back.”
‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ was my almost instinctive answer whenever someone asked me my most favorite book. I say ‘almost’ because I hesitated before giving away my answer. I doubted that I didn’t have a better, or a prepared answer. But then again, we’re always made to mistrust our instincts, to ignore and bury it.
I remembered almost nothing of this novel, except that it was my favorite book of all, that it was a story about two Afghan women, that there was a cripple involved, some bombing, a trip to Bamiyan… the rest had evaporated. It’s mildly terrifying how each day we forget something, and we’re unaware of it all together. A part of us vanishes, turns to nothing, forever, and we can’t even realize it – gone, unceremoniously. Lost. Since March 2017, I may have lost bits of this novel, and my shared experience of reading it, every day, or maybe big chunks of it at a time, I can’t know, but gradually the sheer emotion and confidence that I had about this novel became nothing but a ruined and uninhibited kolba.
Until now, until today. Rereading this novel, I have felt what I had felt before; yet I felt anew what I had felt before precisely because I had lost those memories. From this perspective, as in this rereading experience, the act of forgetting comes out not only friendly but necessary. Reading ‘A thousand splendid suns’, I relived the story of Mariam and Laila, once again with the same sheer unpreparedness and childlike excitement – and I absolutely loved it. I was floored. I became reactive, and even expressed my reactions in forms of random texts to friends, in tears dripping down my cheeks, in quiet reflections - and in verbal discussions - with myself. And when a novel can bring out a reaction in you, you know it is good, and you know that you care about it.
But it is eight years and 274 books later that I’ve picked this book again, that’s a lot of life happening and a lot of other stories read. Since then, I read a few of the daunting classics, the serious literary writers, philosophy and history, I found myself a new favorite author and devoured his books, I read stories from other lands and felt their impacts; then I stopped reading books entirely, and then books pulled me back, I allowed myself to break free from the necessity of books, yet I bought more and more books that I could ever read.
Life happened too: 2017 was my pre-Ex era and I miss it dearly, and since then one person and one story, I can’t even call it ‘our story’, so let’s call it a damaging story, a toxic one, one that lingers and sips at you - have dominated most of my years and my consciousness. Laila, after having returned to Kabul and taking her kids to school one morning, mentions how Mariam is always ‘a breath or two below her consciousness’, and I thought to myself how beautiful a way to express someone’s alive and persistent presence in your thoughts and being. She’s married with a kid, perhaps with her own ‘Aziza’ or ‘Zalmai’, but her immaterial presence is ‘always a breath or two below my consciousness.’ And I also graduated, suffered through severe depression in my ‘year of joblessness and anxiety’, I started ACCA, but I never found someone else to love.
Nevertheless, despite all those books and all those life events, reading Hosseini again has been a proper homecoming for me. And I want to reassure my eight-years-before self and all those hesitated answers claiming this book as my ‘the favorite book’ – that you were right. What you feel true and moving in your heart can never be wrong.
However, since I’ve matured in reading over years, I want to talk about this book and its influence on me as a want-to-be yet cowardly writer. Based on four parts, part one starts in Herat with the story of Mariam in her childhood and ends when she’s married to Rasheed and sent to Kabul. Part two is about Laila and Tariq, both in their childhood as well, living in Kabul during the Soviet-Afghan war, and it ends when Laila’s parents are killed as a rocket lands at their house and Tariq has left Afghanistan. Part three is where these two, so far separated stories and only hinted to be linked, come together as one. Laila becomes Rasheed’s third wife after she’s rescued by the couple, and Laila agrees immediately because she’s pregnant with Tariq’s kid. This part ends when Mariam sacrifices herself after killing Rasheed, so that Laila her children, and returned Tariq, could leave Afghanistan. Part four is where the story is wrapped: while they marry and live in Murree, Pakistan, Laila suggests they go back, now that the Taliban has been toppled. Once back, Laila finds closure in visiting Mariam’s childhood place, and there she gets a letter left to her by her dad, and we hear how tragically Jalil’s story ends as well. Tariq works with an NGO that defuses land mines, Laila teaches at the orphanage where Aziza used to go, and both her children attend school there as well.
The ‘architectonic structure’ of this novel, to borrow a term from Kundera in his book ‘The Art of the Novel’, is both simple and satisfying; it shows how Hosseini must’ve processed the structure of the novel so that it should complement the story he wanted to tell. However, the story that fills that structure remains of utmost significance. Not matter how befitting a form, if the content remains pale, it doesn’t work. And it is for its story, its content, that novel becomes honest in its appeal and in its impact, and therefore so far reaching as well. While the greater part of the appeal this book has for me is due to the relatability I feel toward it, being an Afghan Hazara, and reading my life or that of my parent’s reflected in this story, others who are foreign to its landscape, culture, and people still feel a strong connection because it’s told with honesty and with efforted intent. One can see how Hosseini has put his mind to carve and twist this story, to push it to the limits and offer sighs of hope, that he has put effort not only to tell a story – but to forge it and tell it in a certain way, in a best way. And the structure of the book is the reflection of it.
Nevertheless, the life of a novel, at least for me, lies in its sentences. Don’t give me those two, a complementing structure or a beautifully woven story, but give me beautifully crafted sentences and I am happy. And Hosseini consistently delivers an array of beautiful sentences throughout this book, now capturing an emotion, now capturing a thought, now slightness of a passing action. And these heart-moving bouts of sentences sprinkled every few pages, that meet the reader at their most tender, keep the reading experience of this novel not only an alive experience (as if you’re living the story and not just reading it) but also a transforming one, where you heart aches and pleasures at what is going inside the story. Where you react and cannot help but express it.
Compared to the snobbish culture of curating only a select number of books which land firmly on the requirements of a literary novel, or to Kundera’s well-intended yet still heady sketch of the components of a successful novel (as mentioned in ‘The Art of the Novel’), ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’, or the other two of Hosseini’s novels, fall immediately pale and insignificant. And I’ve always felt sad at that. That a novel, which is basically made of stories, should be judged on intellectual parameters, where it is fundamentally and primarily a matter of heart and emotions – a process of being ‘moved’. And I fell for that trap too all those years back, and I might still be prone it.
Therefore, I call this rereading a proper homecoming precisely because I’ve realized, now with a respectable understanding of books and literature which I didn’t have back then (just like I didn’t have to think about her daily), that it is more important for a novel to be relatable, and thereby moving, to a human heart and to a human experience, rather than being inventive, clever, intellectual, or genre-breaking. And for that ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ still remains, now firmly and proudly, my the most favorite book among 290 so far, and I hope, out of as many books that I’ll ever read.
In the years since, I read Proust, Woolf, Kundera, Roy,
Dillard, de Botton, Shafak, Shaw, Wilde, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Offill, Smith,
Greene, Li, Constant, Rhys, Flaubert, Rooney, Barnes, Voltaire, Rushdie,
Shamsie, Milne… yet while having enjoyed most of these writers and their works,
infatuated even with a few, I return to what I felt to be truest eight
years before, to Hosseini and to the tragic yet life-affirming tale of Mariam
and Laila. I know there are some tragedies which might feel enforced, and some
twists overdone, but it all works at the end. ‘The Kite Runner’ I still claim
is Hosseini’s defining work, and will remain so, but ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’
just gets to the hearts of the readers much more easily and readily.
I give A Thousand Splendid Suns five stars and the whole of
my heart.
March 20, 2025.