A Thousand Splendid Suns

What does it say about a 400-page book when you're capable of reading straight through it in a span of less than ten waking hours? Good things, and plenty of them. I read The Kite Runner one year ago, and liked it enough to purchase this less-known but more-acclaimed follow-up. It was depressing as hell; it was fantastic. While Kite Runner certainly dabbled with the terrors of war-torn Afghanistan, it focused primarily on a rich boy who flees the country with his father in 1980 or so. He becomes a working class American, returns twenty years later to his Taliban-run homeland, and is appalled by what it has become. But this time around, Khaled Hosseini doesn't remove the reader from Afghanistan as war breaks out. Instead, we're dragged right through the gruesome despair as the Soviets, then feuding warlord factions, then Taliban, then finally Americans rain bombs down over the city of Kabul. And there's another key difference - this time around, we see everything through the eyes of two women. Women in the fanatically religious parts of the Middle East are infinitely more interesting than men, because the men there just take a lot of them as wives and never let them show their faces or leave the house. They're mysterious figures by default. And here, we're given a lot more than a glimpse of how much it sucks to be an Afghan woman in the Taliban era. There's an interesting trade-off, too; between the Soviets and warlords in the '80s and early '90s, Afghanistan was always at war, and innocent men, women, and children fell victim to landmines and rockets. The Taliban finally took over in the mid-'90s, and peace was finally here. Except, the Taliban brought any semblance of women's suffrage back to the first millennium. So while the country was finally at "peace," the quality of life for everyone - and women especially - was far worse than it ever had been during wartime. I didn't "learn" a lot from this book in the sense of being made aware of these wars or conflicts for the first time. But, it was certainly eye-opening and jarring to see Taliban Afghanistan through the eyes of two women, fictional though they were. This is definitely a book I recommend to everyone. But I do recommend reading The Kite Runner first, if only because that's the way I did it, and I'm not sure if Kite Runner can be appreciated as much once Splendid Suns is read. Anyway, you make the call, dear readers.