Reflection on "A Thousand Splendid Suns"
Reflection on “a thousand splendid suns”
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs. And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."
Closing the book, I just feel real and hopeful.
I will not say this story is a tragedy, and I hate when people generalise it as a book where everyone died except for Laila, Tariq and their children. Indeed, a depressing and melancholy mood is seemed to be perpetuated throughout the book, which has a large time frame spanning over decades (making it also a thought-provoking historical fiction); we agonise over the misfortune of the many characters, over their fickle lives under the most evil torture of the human rights. It's not the kind of affliction or anguish that is easy to resonate with, as lives as well as the social norms in Afghanistan are unfamiliar to most of us. But somehow, no matter how this book is portrayed as a fiction, from deep inside my heart, I know this must be the reality, the bare truth of a brutal period of modern history. The first reason, I assume, is that Hosseini is a master of story-telling. When I marvelled at Mariam's courage to stand up against Rasheed, moved by Laila and Tariq's unfading hope for a brighter future, I wonder, aren't they just people who cannot be more ordinary? Every time when a person died in the story, especially those who are not the crucial roles and their deaths were merely mentioned in one line, it occurred to me that there must be thousands of Lailas, Tariqs and Mariams in Afghanistan. Each one of them had been the hero in his/her own story. That's why at the end of the story, I felt so real and so empowered - I might be the hero of my own story.
The second reason, is that every character is created so real that you cannot simply love or hate anyone. I was really surprised that I didn't cry for many of the sad scenes until I read about Jalil's Disney tape and his letter. Jalil, the one who deeply broke or, more precisely, devastate Mariam's
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs. And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."
Closing the book, I just feel real and hopeful.
I will not say this story is a tragedy, and I hate when people generalise it as a book where everyone died except for Laila, Tariq and their children. Indeed, a depressing and melancholy mood is seemed to be perpetuated throughout the book, which has a large time frame spanning over decades (making it also a thought-provoking historical fiction); we agonise over the misfortune of the many characters, over their fickle lives under the most evil torture of the human rights. It's not the kind of affliction or anguish that is easy to resonate with, as lives as well as the social norms in Afghanistan are unfamiliar to most of us. But somehow, no matter how this book is portrayed as a fiction, from deep inside my heart, I know this must be the reality, the bare truth of a brutal period of modern history. The first reason, I assume, is that Hosseini is a master of story-telling. When I marvelled at Mariam's courage to stand up against Rasheed, moved by Laila and Tariq's unfading hope for a brighter future, I wonder, aren't they just people who cannot be more ordinary? Every time when a person died in the story, especially those who are not the crucial roles and their deaths were merely mentioned in one line, it occurred to me that there must be thousands of Lailas, Tariqs and Mariams in Afghanistan. Each one of them had been the hero in his/her own story. That's why at the end of the story, I felt so real and so empowered - I might be the hero of my own story.
The second reason, is that every character is created so real that you cannot simply love or hate anyone. I was really surprised that I didn't cry for many of the sad scenes until I read about Jalil's Disney tape and his letter. Jalil, the one who deeply broke or, more precisely, devastate Mariam's