A Book Review on Khaled Hosseini's 'A Thousand Splendid Suns'

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns is a poignant literary experience that takes one to a desolate setting. A story of two women’s lives intertwined, it reveals the impact of a war-torn country and the amount of cultural, economic, and civil persecution it has brought down onto its people.

Coming from the perspective of living in a first-world country, from a state of being an empowered woman who has all the freedom, independence, and education as privileges bestowed upon me by the mere fact of being born into a free world, this work had opened my eyes to another parallel reality — one that is quite an unimaginable, distant concept but sadly lived by so many other women in some places in this world.

The story explores how education is such an important facet of a woman’s life, along with how much it truly means for those who live in a place that does not believe in an educated woman or a woman’s rightful place in society.

It stirred strong emotions within me that made me want to reach out to the main characters myself and tell them what to do. Nevertheless, instead, I had helplessly watched them in my mind’s eye as they experienced rejection, abuse, and exploitation.

This work is not an easy pill to swallow. It took me several moments of having to put it aside to process the harrowing episodes in the main characters’ lives, imagining what I would have done if I was in their shoes. It brought out all the raw, primordial emotions within me, that warrior-like femme fatale that would perhaps have done things differently if put in the same situation.

Nonetheless, I had to teach myself how to simply accept the fact that these characters’ responses were based purely on what they knew, or lack thereof. Their limited options were insufficient to revolt against a deep-seated system of corruption and violence as they had no other comparison of a life otherwise.

In the end, I realised that the kind of redemption these women had was not in the form of outright defiance and public outcry. It came from another form of strength: one that may come across as a foreign concept to a free-spirited, empowered woman brought up with Western influences. What these women may have lacked in knowledge, they had made up for it in endurance. Endurance was both their power and salvation. Given the circumstances, it became their survival and, ultimately, their way out.

As I delved deep into the mere concept of endurance, it initially came across as martyrdom. However, given the situation of women who had no resources to get out of an intricate web of persecution, endurance became their unique form of primal intelligence. Understanding that there are battles that do not require blatant spearheading in the mere quest for justice, rather, they require the ability to stealthily function under the radar within prolonged periods of time for the sake of survival. Put simply, endurance is an innate instinct formed under duress, just until the situation changes.

A moving literary masterpiece, A Thousand Splendid Suns allows one to embrace the more spiritual aspects of human survival as it showcases how, despite the lack of scholarly knowledge, the unwavering strength of the human spirit relentlessly prevails.