Afghanistan — A Thousand Splendid Suns

I read Khaled Hosseini’s novel and thought it was bad

Over the next four or five years or so I’m going to try to read one contemporary(ish) novel set in each country of the world. I’ll go off the list of UN recognised states and work through alphabetically.

I’m doing this because I want to read more contemporary fiction, because I want to diversify my reading, and because I want to better understand the specificities of what makes parts of the world different from others, and I have found that there are few better ways of learning about a country quickly than to read one of its contemporary novels. I’m just doing this for myself, but I thought I’d post mini book reviews as I went as a way to keep track of what I’ve read and what I learned from it.

So first up: Afghanistan and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It’s quite hard to look past Hosseini for a contemporary Afghan novel, and nothing else I found on a quick search sounded like it was quite what I was looking for. I chose A Thousand Splendid Suns as being a little more contemporary than The Kite Runner and because I want to read things I’ve never read before and I did once start (but not finish) The Kite Runner.

This book is bad. I was going to say it was perfectly fine: fairly workmanlike, a little bit mediocre, but nothing wrong with it. But then I got to what in all narrative senses was clearly the end, and was appalled when my kindle told me that I still had 14% of it left to read. What followed was more unnecessary tacked-on additional endings than the director’s cut of Return of the King. This extinguished any positive thoughts I had previously developed towards it.

It also really exemplified the main issue I had with it: it’s so heavy handed. It actually contains some lovely moments and there are one or two lines here and there where the prose is magical. But it’s never happy to leave anything alone: it needs to revisit every good thing it does and re-do it eight or nine more times, more clumsily at each visit, until even the most cloth eared reader imaginable has definitely got the point but nobody continues to enjoy hearing it.

The most clearcut example of this is that after the book (finally) ends there is an afterword, which is a mini essay by the author explaining what he meant. This is followed by a postscript, which is an excerpt from a speech the author gave in which he explains what he meant. This is followed by a reading guide in which somebody (maybe the author, maybe the editor) explains what the book meant. This is followed by “a note on the author” in which Khaled Hosseini is introduced and it is explained what his writings mean. If you have to explain what your book means to someone who has just finished reading it your book has probably failed; if you choose to explain what your book means four times in a row to someone who has just finished reading it then clearly you think your readers are idiots, and this attitude permeates the entire text.

I also have a lingering suspicion (perhaps a legacy of my youthful Michael Morpurgo phase) that authors write tragedy into books because it’s a much quicker and easier way of giving your book emotional punch than actually bothering to make the book good — and A Thousand Splendid Suns has this problem in spades (spoiler: that was a pun).

In terms of learning about Afghanistan: it’s quite extraordinary, given what a central theme Afghanistan’s recent history is in the book, how exceptionally portable the story is. I learned almost nothing about Afghanistan I couldn’t get from wikipedia because honestly this is a kitchen sink melodrama entirely unanchored in time or place. Some of the plot contrivances are specific to certain times in Afghanistan’s history but one could very easily replace them with different plot contrivances that serve the same purpose and so relocate the same story to literally anywhere.

In theory the two main themes of the book are misogyny and Afghanistan’s history, but far from intertwining these themes run almost entirely perpendicular to each other (except during the aforementioned contrivances). I wondered briefly if the author was trying to do a sort of War and Peace thing whereby history, even at its most epic, is pushed into the background as being less consequential than family. Maybe, I thought, this is a corrective text, attempting to add nuance to overly structuralist views of misogyny by pointing out the role of individual agency must not be neglected. Particularly in a place where political power is as weak and contested as it is in Afghanistan it is doubtless true that for many women the attitudes of male family members will have a much greater bearing on their quality of life than whichever ideological faction is nominally in charge. And it’s doubtless true that Afghanistan contains some fanatical Deobandi Talib who, on a personal level, hate women less and behave better towards them than some scumbags with ostensibly impeccably liberal politics. But if this is the thesis then it is not really developed, is undermined at the end, and is then followed by four consecutive essays explaining that this is not the thesis.

So what was the point of the book? The whole thing feels rather unnecessary: a book that was written because the author knew that they could rather than because they had anything to say.

And if it was an unnecessary book to write it also felt unnecessary for Khaled Hosseini to write it. This is a book about the internal lives and thought processes of women, and while it is not as disastrous (or as hilarious) as I Am Charlotte Simmons it did feel like a book that would have been orders of magnitude better if it had been written by a woman rather than based upon a man’s assumptions of what the female experience must be like. Of course I equally have no idea what I’m talking about, and I’d be interested to know how women readers reacted to it: I’m afraid I don’t care enough about this book to do a deep dive into the reviews to find out.

One potentially interesting thing it does is mess with the character’s ages. Babies are sitting up and playing within weeks. Two-year-olds behave like four-year-olds. Four-year-olds behave like 10-year-olds. Nine-year-olds behave like particularly savvy 16-year-olds: master strategists with raging libidos and an in depth knowledge of the entire secondary curriculum. 25-year-olds have grey hair, wrinkles, and sagging bodies. 33-year-olds have arthritis, walk with a stoop, and pray nightly for death to ease their weariness. A 42-year-old makes an unironic speech about how their execution is no tragedy at the end of such a long life (oddly the 70-year-olds are quite sprightly). Maybe this is making a point about how Afghanistan robs people in general (and women in particular) of years in general (and childhoods in particular)? Maybe this is what ageing in Afghanistan actually feels like? Unfortunately Hosseini hasn’t demonstrated enough artistry elsewhere in the text, and in particular hasn’t shown enough trust in the reader, for the reader to trust him that he hasn’t simply forgotten how old his characters are supposed to be. In a book where nothing else is subtle, why would this be? If he’d truly intended this effect would he really have been able to refrain from pointing it out explicitly six times in the main text and four more times in addendums?

It’s not a terrible book. As I say it actually has some lovely moments, and the first two-thirds or so are perfectly decent. But 860 Splendid Suns would have been more than enough.