Reviews: The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

I had heard a lot of good things about two novels published by a new Afghan author, and decided to try them out. When I began with the first novel, I expected a kind of quasi-documentary on Afghan history. As it turns out, I was wrong.

First things first. Khaled Hosseini, the author of the two novels is, as mentioned, an Afghan, settled in the US and is also a member of the UN refugee agency. His two novels are set in Afghanistan, and they tell two quite different stories in a breathtakingly powerful manner. The first novel is not a new one; but I got around to reading it only recently.

The Kite Runner is Hosseini's first novel. Beginning in the 1970s, it tells the story of two young boys, the narrator Amir, and his friend Hassan. They are nigh inseparable, the thickest of friends as you would suspect – but not quite. Hassan is not just a friend of Amir – he is also the son of Amir's servant. And a Hazara, a race that is considered a lower caste. For these reasons, Amir never really admits that Hassan is indeed his friend. Nor does he ever stand up for Hassan whenever other Pashtun kids jeer at his race.

The book's name comes from the kite-flying competition (something the Taliban later banned). Amir struggles to gain acceptance in the eyes of his strict father, who he knows admires Hassan more. Amir is no sportsman, though he is a gifted teller of stories and a poet, but his father appreciates neither. The only avenue left to gain his father's favor is to win the annual kite-flying competition. The competition is a game of skill, requiring participants to cut opponents' kites and be the last man standing. The kite runner is a boy who chases fallen kites and tries to catch them before other kite runners do. Hassan is renowned as one of the best kite runners, and when Amir finally wins the kite competition, it is Hassan who retrieves his last opponent's kite.

But Amir's cowardice culminates in an incident that will haunt him for the rest of his life. It is the beginning of what, for him, is a nagging feeling of guilt that demands redemption.

One of Hosseini's many gifts is the ability to seamlessly weave in real events with the events of his story, giving you the perspective of how those events altered the lives of real people in Afghanistan.

When the Russians invade, Amir and his father, who are among Kabul's elite, escape Afghanistan to land up in the US, where, years later, Amir becomes a famous writer. Yet the ghosts of the past continue to haunt him until one day in 2001, he receives a call that will send him back into the cauldron that Afghanistan has become thanks to the efforts of the Soviets, the Mujahideen and the Taliban.

It is to the author's credit that he does not make the Afghanistan trip look like an adventure. Instead, he focuses on showing a nation that has crumbled, been pummeled by history. No one has been left unscathed and unscarred by the years of battles is what Hosseni tries to say, and he succeeds at it.

The novel is dedicated to the children of Afghanistan. And the sheer terror that the Taliban has inspired is again shown very well. But the best part, the most gripping, is the depiction of the friendship between Amir and Hassan in the first half of the book.

The Kite Runner was a novel that I had difficulty believing was a first attempt. Hosseini deftly manages to put in enough pathos, history and tragedy without making it look forced for the most part. The one minor gripe I had with the book is that at some places, the flow wasn't too smooth, especially Amir's life in America. But perhaps that could be justified to show the contrast with life in Afghanistan.

I thought The Kite Runner was powerful stuff. It was indeed a very engaging story, told with every ounce of sensitivity and quite touching. But as good as it is, The Kite Runner is greatly overshadowed by the shining brilliance Hosseini's second attempt, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

As the cover suggests, this is a novel about the women of Afghanistan. It begins with the story of 15 year old Mariam, who is a harami, a bastard daughter of a rich man and his servant. The word, for obvious reasons, is one she hates, but it is the word that all around her use to describe her. Staying near the town of Herat with her epileptic mother, she longs to join the family of her father.

Tragedy strikes and her mother dies. Mariam's father, who never wanted her, is forced to take her into his household. This arrangement doesn't last for long though, and Mariam is hurriedly married of to Rashed, a man thirty years her senior. And an abusive husband to boot.

After moving to Kabul with Rasheed, life quickly goes downhill for her, and at one point you think it just can't get worse. That is when Hosseini shows that the word "worse" has a different meaning for women in Afghanistan.

Because Laila, a neighbor of theirs, and a girl almost twenty years younger than Mariam is about to undergo a tragedy far worse than even Mariam. Laila is the direct opposite of Mariam. She is a literate girl, with a father whose ideas would be considered very progressive. He strongly believes in getting her an education and later a job – these were days when women could work in Afghanistan. With him, and her boyfriend Tariq, she visits the Bamiyan Buddhas, the same that the Taliban would later destroy.

It's too good to last though. As the war with the Soviets begins, Tariq and his family move to Pakistan, leaving Laila with her family. And her family do not stay long either. They are killed in a blast, of which she is the lone survivor. In these circumstances, Rasheed takes her in, and she is pressganged into marrying him as his second wife.

Predictably, this does not please Mariam, and a cold war begins. On this blog, it may sound the stuff of our dreary TV serials. But that impression couldn't be further from the truth, as you realize when you go further. The ordeal and hardships just get worse with the onset of the Communists, the Mujahideen, the warlords and finally, the Taliban. There was a real progression in barbarity in these successive regimes is used to full effect to show how it influences the lives of these two women.

The barbarity of the regimes is paralleled by the barbarity of Rasheed, which also increases in a similar progression. The women who began as adversaries soon find themselves befriending each other in a world where they have no other friends and no other options.

The novel begins on a slow note, but once the author has shown the contrasts between the two women's individual lives, and brought them together, the story simply becomes more heart wrenching with every chapter. Some points in the novel deserve special mention: the meeting that Laila has with Zaman, an orphanage director and one of the “few good men” left in Afghanistan; Mariam's interactions with Laila's children; Mariam's decision at the end of the book and Laila's reaction to it; and of course the ending itself, which I will not spoil.

While Laila's ordeal seems the harsher of the two, Mariam's role most closely mirrors of Hassan's in the previous novel, and her character simply wins all sympathies by the heartbreaking end.

The events may sometimes seem improbable – its often too barbaric that it may seem artificial. But many Afghan women have experiences that are arguably just as dramatic as as the one presented by Hosseini. Certainly, the barbarities that Laila and Mariam are subjected to, both at home and outside, are not something we've not heard, but stringing them together into one story that is more shattering and devastating than what we are normally used to. And while that may look unreal, we only need to read the Taliban's decrees to know that it was chillingly real.

The novel is not without its share of flaws – some parts in the beginning of Mariam's story are a bit melodramatic and Bollywood-ish, and the epilogue seems a bit too stretched, though a fervent message of hope redeems the final pages.

But in essence, Hosseni's second novel is gripping, extremely powerful and deeply touching. There have been very few novels I've come across that have been as moving as A Thousand Splendid Suns. It is indeed one of the most powerful and honest novels I've ever read.

Both the novels bring you face to face with a country which has been utterly destroyed, ruined and shattered, like the peace of mind of Amir and the lives of Mariam and Laila. But just as there is redemption for Amir in The Kite Runner and a new life for the women in A Thousand Splendid Suns, the novels raise a desperate hope that Afghanistan and its people will never have to again undergo what they have undergone these last thirty years.