A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS Overview

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a 2007 novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini,[ Publisher

Riverhead Books (and Simon & Schuster audio CD)

Publication date

May 22, 2007]  following the huge success of his bestselling 2003 debut The Kite Runner. 

SUMMARY :

A Thousand Splendid Suns is divided into four parts. Part 1 tells the story of Mariam, a young girl born in Afghanistan in the 1950s. Part 2 describes the early life of Laila, who was born in Kabul in the late 1970’s. The lives of the two women intersect in Part 3. Part 4 is from Laila’s perspective. Throughout the story, global and regional power struggles bring chaos and destruction to both women’s lives, and to the country of Afghanistan.

Mariam spends the first fifteen years of her life living with her mother, Nana, in a small kolba (shack) built for them by Mariam’s father, Jalil. Nana and Jalil were not married when Nana became pregnant with Mariam, and Nana often reminds Mariam that she is a harami, an illegitimate child. Jalil visits Mariam weekly, and Mariam longs to be accepted by her father as his other children are. Mariam has one dear friend, Mullah Faizullah, the town tutor. He teaches Mariam from the Koran and cares for Mariam like family. On Mariam’s fifteenth birthday, Jalil does not fulfill his promise to take her to the cinema. It is Mariam’s one wish to be seen around town with her father. When Jalil does not arrive, Mariam leaves her home to find him. Mariam is turned away from her father’s home. When she is taken back to her kolba, Mariam discovers that Nana has hung herself. 

Mariam feels responsible for Nana’s death. When Mariam asked Jalil to take her to see “Pinocchio,” Nana begged Mariam not to leave her alone. Mullah Faizullah tries to comfort Mariam, by visiting her as much as he can. Jalil’s wives soon tell Mariam that she is to be married. Mariam begs her father not to send her away, but Jalil’s decision has already been made. Mariam is married to Rasheed, a shoemaker nearly thirty years older than Mariam. When Jalil sends Mariam to Kabul to live with her new husband, Mariam tells Jalil she never wishes to see him again.

Rasheed’s Islamic beliefs are fundamentalist, and he expects Mariam to keep house, respect her husband, and cover herself when she leaves their home. Kabul is a confusing place for Mariam. While Mariam wears a burqa in public, she sees other women wearing makeup and high heels. Within a few years, Mariam becomes pregnant, and Rasheed prays for a boy. Fariba, a woman from Rasheed’s neighborhood, discovers Mariam bleeding. Rasheed takes Mariam to the hospital, and a doctor confirms that Mariam has had a miscarriage. Soon, Rasheed’s critical attitude toward his wife turns abusive.

In 1978, the political environment in Afghanistan is chaotic. The communist party gains power and eventually overthrows the Afghan government and executes its president. Fariba’s daughter, Laila, is born during this revolution.

Laila has never known her brothers, Ahmad and Noor. The two young men are members of the Afghan resistance fighting against the communist rule of Soviet Russia. Laila’s Mammy is often unwell, in bed, and finds fault with her husband. Hakim, whom Laila calls Babi, is a teacher at the university in Kabul. Babi is tender with Laila and patient with Mammy. When Laila’s family is informed of her brother’s deaths, Mammy is despondent. Laila feels guilty for not grieving as deeply as Mammy. Laila cares more for her dearest friend, Tariq, than she does for her brothers.

Tariq, just a few years older than Laila, is kind to her and a fierce protector. Even though Tariq has lost a leg, he fights neighborhood boys when they bully Laila. As they grow older, Laila becomes more aware of the gossip that surrounds her friendship with Tariq. Though Laila worries about her reputation, she allows her relationship with Tariq to become intimate. By 1992, Laila is fourteen. Communist forces in Afghanistan have been overthrown, and the city of Kabul becomes a battleground for rival warlords. When Tariq tells Laila that his family is leaving Afghanistan, Laila is overcome. The young couple sleep together, even though they have been taught that this is a sin against Allah. Laila refuses to go with Tariq; she will not leave her parents behind. 

Babi finally convinces Mammy to leave Kabul, even though it is Mammy’s dearest wish to see her sons’ cause prevail. As Laila is packing, a rocket hits their home, leaving Mammy and Babi dead and Laila gravely injured.

Rasheed pulls Laila from the rubble, and Mariam nurses Laila back to health. Laila receives a visit from a man named Abdul Sharif. The stranger tells Laila that he spent time in a hospital with Tariq before Tariq died. Laila is heartbroken, and believes Allah is punishing her for not grieving her brothers properly. Rasheed proposes to Laila, and Laila accepts because she is pregnant with Tariq’s child. Laila knows that she has no other choice. Rasheed and Laila are married. Soon, Laila tells Rasheed that she is having his child, and Rasheed once more prays for a son. Again, he is disappointed. Mariam sees how cruel Rasheed is to Laila and her infant daughter, Aziza. Mariam’s once hostile attitude toward Laila grows into fondness. Aziza and Mariam develop a special relationship. 

Rasheed’s cruelty toward the women in his family is tolerated under the new Shari’a law, enforced by the new Taliban regime. Rasheed is now sure that Tariq is Aziza’s real father, and Rasheed uses this secret to keep Laila in line. Mariam and Laila attempt to take the children and leave Rasheed, but the women and children are caught. Under the Taliban, it is illegal for women to run away from the husbands. Rasheed beats Laila and Mariam for trying to leave, and he threatens them with worse if they try again.

Laila does eventually give Rasheed a son, Zalmai. Rasheed spoils his son, and he continues mistreating his wives and Aziza. Rasheed is foolish with his money. When he loses his job, Rasheed forces Laila to put Aziza in an orphanage. Though it is illegal for women to leave their homes without a male family member, Laila visits Aziza as often as she can. She must avoid the Taliban forces, who beat her when they catch her alone. One day, Laila receives a visitor of her own. Tariq is not dead. He has come to take Mariam with him back to Pakistan. Mariam realizes that Rasheed paid a friend to make up the story about Tariq’s death, in order to convince Laila to marry Rasheed.

Zalmai tells his father that Laila had a male visitor. Rasheed is furious, and Mariam sees that he will kill Laila. Mariam beats Rasheed with a shovel until he is dead. Mariam knows she will not live after committing this crime, and she sends Laila and the children away with Tariq. Mariam confesses to murdering her husband, and she is sentenced to death. 

Laila and Tariq take the children to Pakistan, and the two are married. Aziza bonds quickly with her real father, knowing that Tariq will never hurt or leave her. Zalmai asks for Rasheed at first, but he soon learns to love Tariq too. Laila and Tariq watch from afar as the Taliban are driven out by allied forces, following the attack on the United States on September 11th, 2001. Laila convinces Tariq to return to Kabul. On their way home, Laila visits Mariam’s hometown to say goodbye to the woman who saved her life. While there, she meets the son of Mullah Faizullah. Laila learns that the tutor is dead, and so is Mariam’s father Jalil. Jalil had written Mariam a letter, asking for her forgiveness, and he had intended to give Mariam the money from his sold land. 

Laila and Tariq use the money to renovate the orphanage, where Laila is now a teacher. Laila is pregnant with a third child. Kabul has been restored, and Laila wishes her parents were alive to see it.

 THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS THEMES  :

1.History and Memory in Afghanistan

As Laila, Babi, and Tariq drive out on a day trip from Afghanistan, their taxi driver tells of the tumultuous history of the region. He concludes, “And that my friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another.” The novel deals with a thirty-year swath of Afghan history. It begins with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan up until their withdrawal in 1989, and continues through the infighting among the Mujahideen throughout the 1990s. The book ends shortly after the events of September 11, 2001, which introduced many Americans to Afghanistan for the first time. Many events in the characters’ personal lives, in fact, are tightly bound to political events, and the narrator uses history as a reference for the novel’s action.

Through it all, the main characters retain a hold on what they consider the “true” Afghanistan, distinct from those “invaders” who may hold power over the country at any one time. There are often competing notions of the “true” Afghanistan, depending on the characters’ political opinions and beliefs. Babi, for instance, is distraught by an Afghanistan where women cannot participate equally, while for Rasheed such inequality epitomizes the type of country that Afghanistan should be. The reader, however, is clearly meant to take Babi’s side.

The narrator also often stresses the natural beauty and ancient history of Afghanistan, which help to define it. The Taliban’s destruction of the ancient Buddhas visited by Laila, for instance, is portrayed as a devastating attack against the nation itself. Despite the multiple invasions, bombings, and massacres, Laila and Mariam are able to keep their notion of Afghanistan intact through their own memories—for Laila, the happier times of her childhood, and for Mariam, the joy she gained from building a bond with Laila and her children. It is Laila’s continued memory of Afghanistan that compels her to return, despite the violence, at the end of the novel.

2.Suffering and Perseverance

None of the characters in the novel is a stranger to pain and suffering, either physical or emotional. However, this suffering takes different forms. The loss of loved ones brings its own kind of acute pain—often in a way that seems to lack any kind of redemption. On the other hand, there are other types of suffering that the characters willingly endure in the service of others.

A Thousand Splendid Suns seems to grapple with how to create a hierarchy of grief and suffering: is the loss of Laila’s brothers, after Babi (or so Mammy accuses him) allowed them to fight the Mujahideen, somehow worse than the random rocket that killed Laila’s friend Giti? The characters grapple with such suffering in different ways. Mammy takes refuge in her dark bedroom following her sons’ deaths and never quite seems to be able to overcome her grief. Laila is more pragmatic: she marries Rasheed not despite but because of her parents’ death, which she sees as her only option. The novel seems to promote this kind of perseverance over the immobilization that can stem from suffering. Though the suffering that the characters have experienced might be impossible to undo, there is value and strength to be drawn from their ability to endure.

This is especially the case when the characters choose willingly to suffer. Laila, for instance, willingly submits to beatings by the Taliban for traveling as a woman alone, just so that she has the chance of seeing and spending time with her daughter Aziza at the orphanage. Mariam, of course, chooses to kill Rasheed so as to give Laila a chance of a better life, knowing all the same that she will be convicted and executed by the Taliban as a result. This ability to suffer willingly for the benefit of others is portrayed as something women in particular excel at. From Laila’s horrifically painful childbirth to Mariam’s sacrifice, women endure their own suffering and even add to it themselves.

3.Shame and Reputation

A particular kind of suffering in the novel has to do with shame, which comes up again and again as both a pain to be endured and as a tool to inflict on others. In the first case, shame is linked to responsibility and ensuing guilt for an incident in a character’s past. Mariam’s mother’s suicide, after Mariam runs away to Jalil, is one example of such shame. Laila feels her own sense of shame for having survived the bombing that killed her parents, purely by luck.

Another type of shame is intimately linked to social standing and reputation, and that particular type of shame has the power to inflict deep psychological damage. As a harami (bastard), Mariam is made to feel deeply ashamed by her father Jalil’s family, by others in the village, and by her husband Rasheed. She becomes convinced as a result that she does not deserve to be loved, and will never find a place where she belongs. By beating both Mariam and Laila, Rasheed combines psychological and physical harm, making them feel pain but also shaming them and asserting his own power over them.

We see, then, how shame is both intimately personal and extremely political. Many of the Taliban’s laws, particularly regarding the status of women, consider women as shameful (though extraordinarily powerful) creatures that must be barred from the public sphere. These standards are often couched in terms of “protecting” a woman’s “honor,” though honor in the novel is quite often used as the counterpart to shame.

4.Love, Loyalty, and Belonging

In A Thousand Splendid Suns, love may not conquer all, but it is a stronger tie than many other social bonds, from social class to ethnic status. Love makes the novel’s characters act in sometimes irrational ways, and their erratic behavior can often be explained by the strong loyalty that stems from love. Mariam’s love for her father Jalil remains constant despite hints that he is ashamed of her harami—she ultimately turns her back on him only out of love for her own mother. The poignant scene at the end of the novel when Laila receives a letter from Jalil meant for Mariam makes clear that his love for her was never entirely stamped out.

Laila, in turn, believes that by marrying Rasheed and thus saving her and Tariq’s baby, she is remaining loyal to Tariq, even after his death. Laila’s love for Tariq also transcends ethnic boundaries—often a source of tension and violence in Afghanistan—as she is Tajik and he Pashtun.

Though love can cross social boundaries in the novel, it is also a way to create a territory of belonging. Tariq and Laila band together in love against the destruction and suffering around them, while Mariam initially believes to find in her marriage to Rasheed a place where she can finally belong. Mariam’s final dramatic act of killing Rasheed is, paradoxically, based on her close relationship with Laila. The novel portrays such an act, though morally complex, as a powerful statement of love.

5.  Women and femininity ,Gender Relations , Gender inequality, Slavery to the household 

By telling the story of A Thousand Splendid Suns through the perspective of two Afghan women, Hosseini can emphasize certain aspects of Afghan life and history that differ from the established historical narrative. The novel, in fact, draws on the limitations imposed on women in Afghan life in order to explore how women have lived, endured, and subverted these constraints.

Gender relations differ throughout the novel depending on the occupying forces and the laws that accompany them. Under communist rule, for instance, girls are permitted to attend school and work outside the home. Babi celebrates this status and encourages Laila to take advantage of it. At the same time, however, girls are discouraged from spending too much time with members of the opposite sex before they’re married. Gender relations can also depend on specific traditional or regional norms—Mariam, for instance, is required by her husband to wear a burqa long before this becomes law. Men, like Laila’s brothers, are the ones who go off to fight, while the women stay home and often must deal with the repercussions of war.

The relatively progressive gender norms under communism change drastically with the arrival of the Mujahideen and, eventually, the Taliban. For Laila, the restrictions have the effect of taking Kabul, the city that she always thought of as hers, away from her, limiting her freedom of speech and movement. Even so, the characters find ways to subvert these norms: Laila sneaks across town to the orphanage, and with Mariam she plans an escape (though ultimately a thwarted one) from Rasheed. The Taliban may have legally sanctioned Rasheed’s violent beatings, but Hosseini is clearly on the side of greater freedoms for women, and the reader is meant to cheer on Laila and Mariam as they struggle against these inequalities. 

6. Female Friendship

Everything you need for every book you read.

Female Friendship

Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors History and Memory in Afghanistan Theme Icon Suffering and Perseverance Theme Icon Shame and Reputation Theme Icon Love, Loyalty, and Belonging Theme Icon Gender Relations Theme Icon Female Friendship Theme Icon

LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Thousand Splendid Suns, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Female Friendship Theme Icon

Though gender norms shift throughout the course of the novel as a result of changing occupations and laws, one constant theme is friendship between women. The relationship between Mariam and Laila rests at the heart of the novel, as even its structure reveals: Part I takes Mariam’s perspective, Part II takes Laila’s, and Part III alternates between them. Laila also treasures her friendship with her classmates Giti and Hasina, with whom she shares laughs, games, and secrets about boys—forgetting for a time about the violence and dangers of their adolescence.

By the time the Mujahideen impose their own restrictions on the place of women in Afghanistan, female friendship becomes one way to subvert these restrictions from within. Mariam and Laila, for instance, band together against Rasheed, the husband of both and the source of much of their suffering. Most drastically, this takes the form of their plot to escape. But in more subtle ways, the time they spend together drinking tea, joking, and laughing allows them to draw strength from each other and endure their oppression. Even in a society where women cannot participate in the public sphere, the book suggests, relationships between women serve not only as a source of escape but as a means to assert their own legitimacy and dignity.

Symbolism in

A Thousand Splendid Suns

The Burqua is meant to symbolize the imprisonment that marriage brings to women in the Middle East. Neither Mariam nor Laila had ever had to wear one before they married Rasheed, yet it was one of the first things he enforced after the marriage. In the book, Mariam says wearing a Burqua is an interesting experience because it is like watching the whole world from a one-sided window- you can see everything, but no one can see you. This also symbolizes the way Afghan women feel regarding their status in the world; invisible women with unseen problems and ignored inequality.

The Pinocchio symbol lends itself well to many elements of the novel. In the Disney film, Pinocchio can become real only if he is brave, truthful, and unselfish. Pinocchio must navigate through temptations in a society where he is still a puppet, not yet human. Mariam, representing the women and mothers of Afghanistan, is viewed by the male-dominated society as sub-human, like a wooden puppet who is not yet a real boy. Mariam's existence becomes wooden. Over time she becomes Rasheed's puppet. He pulls the strings. She stays home. She cooks. She cleans. She becomes Rasheed's scapegoat, and he beats her when his aggression boils over. It is love that begins Mariam's transformation. She receives love through the other protagonist, Laila, along with Laila's children. Eventually, Mariam is fully transformed, and she realizes the full beauty of the world along with her own true radiance.

The Titanic appears as a metaphor for the city of Kabul under the Taliban—the city, like the ship, is headed for certain disaster. When the movie Titanic comes to Kabul in the summer of 2000, four years into the Taliban regime and three years into a terrible drought, it creates a sensation. Vendors sell Titanic carpets, Titanic cloth, Titanic deodorant, toothpaste, perfume, fried snacks, and even burqas. A persistent beggar calls himself “Titanic Beggar.” The city becomes a virtual “Titanic City.” People wonder what the attraction of the movie is. Some say it’s the song; some say it’s the sea, the luxury, or the ship; some say it’s the sex in the movie or the attractiveness of its star, Leonardo di Caprio. But Laila has a different idea. She believes that in this disastrous time, people are attracted to the idea that someone will save them, just as Jack saves Rose in the movie. However, she says, nobody will save them: “Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead.”

Laila's virginity is very symbolic in A Thousand Splendid Suns. At the same time that Laila gives it away, her country starts to fall in shambles. Something that she held dear for so long was lost, just as a nation that was loved and stable was torn apart. Her virginity also symbolizes a connection between herself ad Tariq that couldn't be lost by distance or lies. Even though they were cast apart because of events and people, they had a bond that could not be broken.

Purpose of the book :

Khaled Hosseini's purpose is to show the hardships of women in Afghanistan and all they must endure in the household as well as society. 

A moral lesson of A Thousand Splendid Suns:

The moral message from this book shows “We should be grateful for what we have, by never taking the people that bring happiness and fulfilment in our lives for granted.