A Thousand Splendid Suns

Title The title of the book comes from a line in Josephine Davis' translation of the poem "Kabul", by the 17th-century Iranian poet Saib Tabrizi: :"Every street of Kabul is enthralling to the eye :Through the bazaars, caravans of Egypt pass :One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs :And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls" Hosseini explained "I was searching for English translations of poems about Kabul, for use in a scene where a character bemoans leaving his beloved city, when I found this particular verse. I realized that I had found not only the right line for the scene, but also an evocative title in the phrase 'a thousand splendid suns,' which appears in the next-to-last stanza." Inspiration When asked what led him to write a novel centered on two Afghan women, Hosseini responded:"I had been entertaining the idea of writing a story of Afghan women for some time after I'd finished writing The Kite Runner. That first novel was a male-dominated story. All the major characters, except perhaps for Amir's wife Soraya, were men. There was a whole facet of Afghan society which I hadn't touched on in The Kite Runner, an entire landscape that I felt was fertile with story ideas...In the spring of 2003, I went to Kabul, and I recall seeing these burqa-clad women sitting at street corners, with four, five, six children, begging for change. I remember watching them walking in pairs up the street, trailed by their children in ragged clothes, and wondering how life had brought them to that point...I spoke to many of those women in Kabul. Their life stories were truly heartbreaking...When I began writing A Thousand Splendid Suns, I found myself thinking about those resilient women over and over. Though no one woman that I met in Kabul inspired either Laila or Mariam, their voices, faces, and their incredible stories of survival were always with me, and a good part of my inspiration for this novel came from their collective spirit." Similar to The Kite Runner, the manuscript had to be extensively revised; with Hosseini ultimately rewriting the book five times before it was complete. The novel's anticipated release was first announced in October 2006, when it was described as a story about "family, friendship, faith and the salvation to be found in love". ==Plot==

On the outskirts of Herat, Mariam lives with her embittered mother, Nana, in a secluded hut. Born as the result of an affair between her mother and Jalil, a wealthy local businessman, Mariam and her mother live outside the city in order to avoid confronting Jalil's legitimate family. Nana resents Jalil for his actions and deceptive attitude towards Mariam, whom he visits every Thursday. On Mariam’s fifteenth birthday, Jalil does not show up to take her to see Pinocchio in town as promised. Against Nana’s wishes, Mariam travels to Herat herself to find her father, and sleeps outside his house when told he is away, but later discovers he was home the entire time. Heartbroken, she returns home to find that Nana has committed suicide by hanging. Briefly moving into Jalil’s house, Mariam is soon rushed into marriage with Rasheed, a widowed shoemaker from Kabul thirty years her senior, and moves to Kabul. Rasheed is initially courteous to Mariam, but over the course of seven miscarriages he becomes increasingly abusive toward her, angered by her inability to provide him a son. Years later, an ailing Jalil attempts to visit Mariam but she refuses to allow him inside. Meanwhile, Mariam's young neighbor Laila grows up close to her schoolteacher father and is worried for her mother, who is deeply depressed following the death of her two sons fighting for the Mujahideen against the Soviets. Laila is close friends with Tariq, a local Pashtun boy with one leg, and romance develops between them as they grow up. When Laila is fourteen, civil war breaks out in Afghanistan, and Kabul is bombarded by frequent rocket attacks. Tariq's family decide to leave the city and, while saying their good-byes, he and Laila have sex in a moment of passion. Shortly after, a rocket hits Laila’s home as they prepare to flee, killing her parents. She is taken in by Mariam and Rasheed, and as she recovers from her injuries, Rasheed begins courting her, to Mariam's dismay. A man arrives at Rasheed's home to inform Laila that Tariq and his family died in a bomb blast on their way to Pakistan. Realizing that she is pregnant with Tariq's child, Laila agrees to marry Rasheed, convincing Rasheed that the child is his. She gives birth to a daughter, whom she names Aziza. The childless Mariam initially treats Laila coldly, avoiding contact with her and Aziza. They eventually become friends, forming a close mother-daughter-like bond, and support each other in enduring Rasheed's abuse and raising Aziza. They attempt to flee one day, but are caught by the local police and severely beaten and nearly starved by Rasheed as punishment. Meanwhile, the Taliban rise to power in Kabul and impose harsh rules on the local population, severely curtailing women's rights. Laila is forced to give birth to a son, Zalmai, via caesarian section without anaesthesia in a deprived women’s hospital. Laila and Mariam struggle with raising Zalmai, whom Rasheed dotes on and favors over Aziza. During a drought, Rasheed's workshop burns down, and he is forced to take other jobs, worsening his mood and abuse. Due to a lack of food, Rasheed forces Laila to send Aziza to an orphanage and refuses to accompany her to visit Aziza. Laila endures beatings from the Taliban for travelling alone to visit Aziza. One day, Tariq suddenly shows up on Laila's doorstep, much to her shock. Laila realizes that Rasheed had paid the man to lie to her about Tariq's death, so that she would stay in Kabul and marry him. Laila and Mariam plan to escape again, this time with Tariq's help. However, when Rasheed returns home from work, Zalmai informs his father Rasheed that Laila had a male visitor. Enraged, Rasheed reveals that he has suspected Aziza’s true paternity all along and begins viciously beating the women and attempts to strangle Laila. To save Laila, Mariam kills Rasheed with a shovel. Knowing the Taliban would be after them, Mariam decides to turn herself in to draw attention away from Laila and Tariq's escape with the children. Confessing the murder to the Taliban, Mariam is sentenced to public execution. She complies peacefully, having found unexpected happiness and love in her years with Laila and the children. Laila and Tariq successfully escape Afghanistan with the children and move east to Murree in the Pakistani Punjab, and they marry. After the fall of the Taliban, they return to Kabul to join the rebuilding of Afghan society. They stop en route to Herat, and Laila visits the village where Mariam was raised. She meets with the son of a kindly mullah who had taught Mariam, and he gives her a box Jalil had left for Mariam should she return to Herat. The box contains a videotape of Pinocchio, a sack of money, and a letter in which Jalil expresses his regret and love for Mariam, wishing he had fought for her and raised her as his child. The family return to Kabul and use the money to repair the orphanage Aziza had stayed in, and Laila soon works there as a teacher. She becomes pregnant with her third child, whom she intends to name Mariam if it is a girl. ==Analysis==

Family When asked about common themes in The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini replied:"Both novels are multigenerational, and so the relationship between parent and child, with all of its manifest complexities and contradictions, is a prominent theme. I did not intend this, but I am keenly interested, it appears, in the way parents and children love, disappoint, and in the end honor each other. In one way, the two novels are corollaries: The Kite Runner was a father-son story, and A Thousand Splendid Suns can be seen as a mother-daughter story." A Riverhead Trades Weekly review states that the novel consistently shows the "patriarchal despotism where women are agonizingly dependent on fathers, husbands and especially sons, the bearing of male children being their sole path to social status." ==Reception==

In the first week following its release, A Thousand Splendid Suns sold over one million copies, Jonathan Yardley said in the Washington Post "Book World", "Just in case you're wondering whether Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns is as good as The Kite Runner, here's the answer: No. It's better." A Thousand Splendid Suns received significant praise from reviewers, with Publishers Weekly calling it "a powerful, harrowing depiction of Afghanistan" and USA Today describing the prose as "achingly beautiful". Lisa See of The New York Times attributed the book's success to Hosseini "[understanding] the power of emotion as few other popular writers do". Cathleen Medwick gave the novel a highly positive review in O, the Oprah Magazine:"Love may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you consider the war-ravaged landscape of Afghanistan. But that is the emotion—subterranean, powerful, beautiful, illicit, and infinitely patient—that suffuses the pages of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. As in his best-selling first novel, The Kite Runner, Hosseini movingly examines the connections between unlikely friends, the fissures that open up between parents and children, the intransigence of quiet hearts." The New York Times writer Michiko Kakutani wrote a more critical review, describing the opening as "heavy-handed" and early events in the novel as "soap-opera-ish". Despite these objections, she concluded, "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." The depictions of the lead female characters, Mariam and Laila, were praised by several commentators. John Freeman from The Houston Chronicle found them "enormously winning" while Carol Memmott from USA Today further described them as "stunningly heroic characters whose spirits somehow grasp the dimmest rays of hope". Lisa See wrote that, with the exception of Tariq, "the male characters seem either unrelentingly evil or pathetically weak" and opined, "If a woman wrote these things about her male characters, she would probably be labeled a man-hater." On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed A Thousand Splendid Suns on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels. == Challenges ==

Columbia Pictures owns the movie rights to the novel. Steven Zaillian finished writing the first draft of the screenplay in 2009 and was also slated to direct; Scott Rudin had signed on as a producer. In May 2013, studios confirmed a tentative release date of 2015, although as of 2022 the film remains unproduced. The first theatrical adaptation of the novel premiered in San Francisco, California, on February 1, 2017. It is co-produced by the American Conservatory Theater and Theatre Calgary. The theatrical adaptation condenses the novel for length, beginning with the deaths of Hakim and Fariba and telling earlier sections (such as Mariam's childhood and Laila and Tariq's romance) through flashbacks. A television limited series adaptation of the novel is in works by One Community. An opera adaptation of the novel, composed by Sheila Silver, was commissioned by Seattle Opera and premiered on February 25, 2023. ==References==