#57Title: A Thousand Splendid SunsAuthor: Khaled HosseiniPublisher: Riverhead
Year: 2007
Genre: Fiction, Afghanistan
384 pages
As easy to enter into and as absorbing as The Kite Runner, Hosseini's second novel is again set in Afghanistan over a long enough period for readers to absorb the flavor and preoccupations of several recent governments and upheavals. Hossneini's writing is descriptive without being over-elaborate, and his characters are psychologically coherent. I enjoyed the converging tales of two women's lives, and I thought the Naomi and Ruth reference worked well. A number of the locales and experiences described in the sections taking place in the Taliban's Kabul evoked the CNN report Beneath the Veil, Saira Shah's 2001 undercover documentary. Perhaps because I had images from this program in mind, these sections of the book were particularly vivid.
The plot was sometimes predictable and contrived. I found the last several sections rushed in a way that decreased their resonance and interfered with my suspension of disbelief, and reader buy-in is critical to accepting some rather increadible events. I would not characterize the novel as uplifting, but perhaps as ultimately emotionally triumphant.
As an aside, a mention of Laila and Mariam's "three cups of tea" made me think to move Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time forward in my queue, despite its unfortunate misuse of ellipsis right out there in front of god and everybody.
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