After his post-Sept. 11 novel The Kite Runner"" successfully garnered rave celebrity reviews and sold more than 4 million copies, readers awaited Khaled Hosseini's ""A Thousand Splendid Suns"" with bated breath. Released in May, ""Suns"" has yet to gather speed in terms of literary critical acclaim, but Hosseini's storytelling is impeccable nonetheless.
Mapping relationships between husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, friends and lovers, Hosseini's second novel seeks ultimately to compile an atlas of the human experience - particularly for women - in post-Soviet Afghanistan.
Young Mariam's mother commits suicide, leaving the 15-year-old with no other option but to marry a beastly, misogynistic man whose physically and mentally abusive behavior toward her worsens as it becomes apparent Mariam cannot bear children. She lives in constant fear of ""his volatile temperament ... punches, slaps, kicks."" Rasheed's abuse is evident in Mariam's public and private life. He forces her to wear a burqa outside at all times. At one point, he criticizes her cooking in her own kitchen and shoves pebbles in her mouth, crudely comparing her rice to the rocks.
Here, the story intersects with Laila, a lovely, educated Kabul girl whose childhood friend and lover flees with his family to be a refugee in Pakistan. After receiving news that her lover Tariq may be dead in the aftermath of a rocket attack, a rocket destroys her own house, kills her parents and leaves her alone in Kabul, pregnant and 14 years old. Mariam's brutish husband Rasheed capitalizes on Laila's unfortunate condition, quickly marrying her and provoking Mariam's contempt for the young, pretty girl.
But after Laila gives birth to a daughter - which Rasheed assumes to be his own - the two women grow closer and band together to deflect Rasheed's horrific verbal and physical blows. Naturally, the mental barricade they form to block Rasheed's villainous words and beatings blossoms into an even stronger friendship.
Through charting these characters' moments of pain, despondency, trust and love, Housseini succeeds at providing the reader with an accurate glimpse of life in the war-torn country from the 1970s-'90s. His depictions of the 'Titanic' movie craze are sadly comical, as citizens unearth television sets to watch the video surreptitiously, and his heavier imagery of rockets exploding in Kabul illustrates the destruction that abounded in the immediate post-Soviet Afghanistan.
However, unfortunately for this tale, Hosseini's character development is not as apt. Mariam and Laila are somewhat flat characters, shaped not by their personalities or even their appearance, but primarily by their situations - Mariam's hard-knock life and Laila's ""A Little Princess"" scenario offer little for the reader to mull over. Rasheed is the prototypical, black-cowboy-hat-wearing villain, not the occasionally enlightened antagonist.
Simply stated, the women are good. Rasheed is bad. Good and Good bond together to fight Bad.
Despite these flaws in profiling, Hosseini's story is rife with historical dates and emotion-inducing character reactions to three of Afghanistan's most defining political periods.
Following his characters through Soviet, Mujahideen and Taliban rule, Hosseini illustrates the female experience in Afghanistan. Laila's father even muses that the Soviet rule was ""a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan,"" in contrast with the fervently religious rule of the Mujahideen and ruthlessly oppressive dictates of the Taliban. Rasheed, of course, rejoices as the Taliban takes power.
Although Hosseini's second novel is not a literary masterpiece, he crafts his story masterfully as a sort of sociological cartographer - the epitome of a popular fiction ""page-turner,"" ""Suns"" excels at mapping the female condition in Afghanistan.
