A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Hosseini’s followup to The Kite Runner takes us back to Kabul for another closeup look at the Taliban’s evil. This time our narrator is a poor village woman, the bastard daughter of a wealthy merchant. She’s married off young to a creep from Kabul who abuses her and his second wife terribly. Things proceed from here, and we end up with a well written version of “Sleeping With the Enemy in Kabul.”

The prose is good, though not great. (But far better than my Pushtun or Urdu, so really, we should just be saluting Hosseini, and not worry about being too critical on this front.) The plotting is stronger than in the Kite Runner.

I enjoyed learning more about poor benighted Afghanistan and about some of the simple kindnesses and beauty that can help bring color and happiness to even the most unfortunate of lives.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner had the same kind of buzz surrounding it that The Life of Pi did. The same people were telling me about it, the same vague part of the world invoked in their commentary.

As the first novel I’ve ever read from an Afghani, I was delighted. The prose is good without being flashy or great. The plotting is fine, if a tad contrived at various points. The descriptions of Kabul make me think it must have been a fine and fabulous city before the soviets came and wrecked everything.

I have issue with the inclusion of blond-haired-blue-eyed Nazism as a root of evil. It seems to me that the Taliban are a regionally grown menace, who reached their sick conclusions without much influence from Mein Kampf. So then, in a sense, having the evil Talib baddie as a white man felt like a way of shifting blame to an “other.”

Otherwise, the novel was pretty good; I enjoyed it but didn’t love it, and while I’d read his later works, which I see appearing in bookstores everywhere, I’ve not run right out to buy it yet.