review
I only realized how much a book can touch you when I turned the last page of Khaled Hosseini’s book ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’, which I had read in one breath. It had been a long time since a book impressed me so much.
Violence and human suffering in the media
We read in newspapers about Afghanistan, about the Taliban, Al Queida, about the Jihad, about
bombs and missiles, about war, about hunger, pain and death. We see images of destroyed cities, of people crying desperately, wounded and dead bodies. We stare at the images with open mouths and put a hand over our mouth and say: “Oh how awful!”. And we get on with our lives. We make coffee and change the TV channel to our favorite soap. We sometimes seem dumbfounded by all the cruelty and injustice in the world presented to us by the media.
A thousand brilliant suns
But who A thousand brilliant suns reads cannot be left untouched. I had heard and seen so much about Afghanistan, but never before has the essence of what happened there penetrated so deeply as after reading this book. Khaled Hosseini knows how to make the consequences for the people of the years of wars very tangible in the two female main characters Mariam and Laila.
It was as if the two main characters, Mariam and Laila, took my hand and guided me through their lives. Black letters on white paper form sentences and became a story that broke away from the paper and took on a lifelike form. Mariam and Laila are two very different women whose paths converge. Mariam was an illegitimate child, conceived by a wealthy father who was highly regarded by a poor woman. As a fifteen-year-old girl, Mariam is married off by her father, whom she adored as a child after her mother committed suicide. In this way, her father avoids having to take his daughter out of wedlock into his home, which would compromise his honor and prestige. She is married off to Rasheed, a shoe salesman in Kabul thirty years older. Twenty years later she has to deal with the young and beautiful Laila. Laila was taken out of the rubble by Rasheed after a rocket attack, in which Laila’s parents were killed. Rasheed marries Laila in the hope that she can give him a son, unlike Mariam, who has remained childless. In the beginning there is a lot of rivalry between the two women and they don’t want to know about each other. But under Rasheed’s harsh rule at home and his violent outbursts of anger, a close bond develops between the two women. The two women go through hell, along with the two children Laila gave birth to, but they have each other and together they bravely make it through the battle. It is a story of unending love and sacrifice in the face of terrible wars.
The life story of many Afghans
The story of Mariam and Laila is very touching because it is representative of the lives of many people in Afghanistan. It depicts the harsh reality of millions of Afghans, whose lives are marked by pain, loss and inconsolable grief.
The Important Gift of Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini has a gift. He is a storyteller par excellence, who knows how to touch his reader’s heart. He has a gift with which he is playing an important role in this world. He succeeds not only in capturing in words the horrific suffering and injustice that reigns in the world, but also by making it tangible to the reader with words and raising people’s awareness. A gift that must be cherished and that undoubtedly leads to more humanity, more love and more peace on the earth.