Women’s view

FICTION
Women’s view
The Hindu
AUNOHITA MOJUMDAR

A Thousand Splendid Suns documents, in vivid detail, the lives of Afghan women, in both the richness and the poverty of their lives.
Hosseini doesn’t make any overt political choices amongst the warring factions, but does portray the mujahideen years and that of the Taliban as the worst for women.

A second book is often an unfortunate addendum to a great first book, a limping shadow that disappoints, lurks and then disappears into obscurity, taking with it the author who is quickly transformed from the creator of a best seller to the writer wh o could not repeat his genius. Not so Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.Splendid repeat
The Afghan-born author’s book has shot to the top of the bestsellers lists soon after its simultaneous release in several languages. Hosseini, it appears, can rest easy, at least with his publishers, having repeated the success that came to him with his debut novel The Kite Runner, which explored the story of friendship between two Afghan boys.
Comparisons between the two books are inevitable, more so because Hosseini’s new novel returns to some of the territory familiarised in the first book. Yet the stomping ground is quite different. The first person narrative is replaced by the slower cadence of lives observed. In A Thousand Splendid Suns the main characters are all women — four portraits spanning four generations and six different periods of conflict in Afghanistan. The monarchy, the new republic, the Sov iet incursion and its puppet government, the short-lived mujahideen government followed by the chaos of the mujahideen wars, the brutal order of the Taliban, followed by the American-led “bombing to liberation” and the current government.
Most of the story takes place in Kabul and in the Western city of Herat with a brief incursion into neighbouring Pakistan which has hosted million of Afghan refugees during the long years of conflict.
The core of the story revolves around two of the four women who are divided by almost a generation and by social segregation. The story of each woman is narrated in alternating chapters and the two halves slowly come together. The book documents their relationship or their many relationships with each other which they develop, discard and transcend until a climactic moment.Story worth telling
But the tale is more than a tale of two women. If The Kite Runner explored and brought alive some of the complexities of interrelationships in a ethnically diverse and unequal society shattered by war, A Thousand Splen did Suns documents, in vivid detail, the lives of many Afghan women, in both the richness and the poverty of their lives and that is a story worth telling and retelling.
Nearly six years after the so-called liberation of Afghanistan, Afghan women could well question whether this liberation was for just half of the country’s population. The denial of basic human rights to women, which demonised the Taliban and helped build the international support for the invasion, continues to be practised to varying degrees in Afghanistan. Though Afghan women now have equal rights on paper, strong and repressive social mores dictate otherwise. For the slightest degree of freedom to participate in public spaces and civil society, women are dependent on the goodwill of their families, husbands, in-laws, community, ethnic tribe and the generosity of the judiciary. Women, sometimes girls as young as seven, are still bartered to settle debts and seal bargains and the criminal system treats women running away from domestic abuse and sexual violence as perpetrators of a crime, and not as its victims, for having violated the family honour. Hosseini doesn’t make any overt political choices amongst the warring factions, but does portray the mujahideen years and that of the Taliban as the worst for women. The current situation is portrayed as a beneficial one for Afghanistan and for its women.Complex tapestry
Hosseini is a good storyteller and he weaves a tapestry in which politics, ethnicity and economics forms the backdrop, tinting it with the sounds, smells and colours of Afghanistan. Different lives and events are drawn together like strands of a warp and weft. He counts the victims, the dead and the maimed but also the survivors. One of the most powerful parts of the book is the documentation of the struggle to survive, to find enough food: the slow progress from wholesome meals to scratchy diets, the slow loss of weight, the malnourishment leading to quick aging, the creeping illnesses which mirror the political emaciation of Afghanistan.
The pace, the voice and the march of the book is distinct and different from The Kite Runner, lacking a certain urgent immediacy of the earlier book. It is at the end of the book, however, that the author of The Kite Runner shows up clearly: the build up, the climactic moment and the dissipation of tension into a neat and regular ending. The tidying up of loose ends, bringing order to the mess and mash and unfinished beginnings of real life, the trimming of a wild garden into a well- manicured lawn. It is also perhaps what makes A Thousand Splendid Suns a bestseller and a good book, and keeps it from becoming a great one.