The snobbery against the titles on the bestseller lists can sometimes have a deleterious effect. My downfall arrived with the initial skepticism of my response to the appearance of Khaled Husseini on the literary radar.
In 2004, "The Kite Runner" was met with wide critical acclaim and a quick ascent on the bestseller lists. Wary of the book's instant fame, I didn't crack the cover of Husseini's first novel until sometime later. Instantly, I found myself captivated by the pleasure of his prose and chastised myself for the pomposity that had fueled the delay.
Husseini plunges into Afghanistan, gloves off but not without a well-polished selection of words, and depicts the transformation of the country with vivid imagery and a concrete narrative, if not a particularly original one. "The Kite Runner" is set in a tumultuous environment, but it could have traced the most mundane lives and I would have been entranced, if only by the beauty of Husseini's manipulations of language.
Upon the appearance of Husseini's second book, I did not put off the pleasure of his talents as a writer. In "A Thousand Splendid Suns," Husseini crafts a mesmerizing story of a friendship that is punctuated and even dependent on the extreme conditions of war. Once again immersing himself in the turmoil of Afghanistan's history, Husseini follows the trajectory of his characters' lives up through the attacks on the World Trade Center, taking note of the effects of American fear on a country halfway around the world.
While "The Kite Runner" was predominantly a masculine narrative, Husseini's second novel features two women as its magnetic protagonists. The first is Mariam, the harami (bastard) daughter of a wealthy man in a small provincial town. Upon the death of her mother, she is given in marriage to an older, widowed man in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital. The marriage sours rapidly and her failure calcifies when Mariam proves unable to bear children at all, much less the desired son. Husseini chronicles with sensitivity Mariam's gradual decline from an eager and hopeful daughter to an embittered, careful wife. At moments, her life seems salvageable, only to be condemned by the tricks of fate.
Laila, who is introduced to the reader after Mariam has been abandoned to her fate, is representative of a different side of Afghani culture. She is the product of the privileges and the rosier freedoms of a happy childhood. The only daughter of a Kabuli schoolteacher and his wife, her family is particularly modern in its sensibilities. Even when Afghanistan has fallen under the Taliban's strict governmental regime, Laila's father insists on the continuation of her education.
The romantic relations in Laila's life are a complete contrast to Mariam's. Laila has the freedom to love whom she chooses, but the onset of the war erases this, as well as all other differences between the two women. It delivers the unlucky harami and the privileged modern woman into the same household where Laila becomes the second wife of Mariam's husband. Soon the reader is waiting with the women for the next shift in the struggle for power, both domestically and on a national level.
Husseini's success with "The Kite Runner" relied primarily on its prose, as the novel was largely predictable in its content. "A Thousand Splendid Suns" benefits from Husseini's established talent with words and his newfound ability to take a story and torque it at critical junctures. His second novel contains audacious narrative twists that are timed with impeccable precision and delivered with such poise that the result is astonishment on behalf of the reader and, at least in my case, audible alarm.
Having successfully written a book that supersedes his first novel's shortcomings, Husseini distinguishes himself as an author who is only beginning to tap into his talents as a writer.