This book is set against the backdrop of the war in Afghanistan, spanning three decades, and focuses on the tragic fate of two Afghan women, providing us with a glimpse into the lives of the Afghan people, especially women.
Under the violent collision of meager hope and bloody reality, it makes us realize the hard-won peace, happiness and freedom of women, understand the importance of patience, faith, education, and redemption to a person, and prompts us to reflect: if we are doomed to face a miserable life, where do we go from here?
Khaled Hosseini, author of A Thousand Splendid Suns, was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and fled to the United States because of the war. His first novel, The Kite Runner, was a huge success when it came out, winning various newcomer awards and staying on the Amazon charts for 131 weeks.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is Hosseini's touching follow-up to The Kite Runner, a moving story of family, friendship, faith, and salvation through love, told in delicate and touching strokes. The two heroines of the book***, Mariam and Laila. They have different destinies due to their different birth backgrounds and family education.
They are each with a different era of tragic memories, *** with the war, poverty and domestic violence suffered under the weight of the latent misery and patience intertwined with each other, so that they were once incompatible, but also so that they concluded a friendship, and mutual help, and even love like a mother and daughter.
But no matter how bitter and bitter life, they still have a brilliant heart of a thousand suns. As the seventeenth-century Afghan poet Saeb wrote: "One cannot count the number of bright moons on her roof, or the thousand brilliant suns behind her walls."
Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of Zaril, a wealthy merchant, and his maid, Nana, and is housed by Zaril in a humble mud hut on a desolate mountain from birth, where she is dependent on Nana for fifteen years.
The first time Mariam hears the word "Harami" is on a Thursday when she is five years old. While waiting for Zalil, she climbed up on a chair and accidentally broke a bowl of soup with a dragon on it, a piece of Chinese porcelain that Nana's mother had left to Nana. Nana, furious, grabs Mariam and yells, "You clumsy little halami. This is what I get in return for putting up with everything, a klutzy little harami who breaks family heirlooms!"
At the time, Mariam was too young to understand the discrimination contained in the word. Later, when she was older, Mariam understood that halami is something that people don't want, and realized that she was a person who was not recognized by the law, and could never legally enjoy the things that other people have: things like love, loved ones, family, recognition, and so on.
Out of guilt, Zaril visits Mariam every Thursday with smiles, gifts, and intimacy, telling her stories about the town, the new movies that are playing in his theater, teaching her how to fish, how to properly butcher a salmon, how to draw an elephant with a single brushstroke. ...... Zaril becomes Mariam's only link to the outside world. proving to her that a vast world exists beyond the mud hut.
Mariam trembled with pride at having a father as knowledgeable as Zariel, and it made her feel that she, too, could have the beauty and generosity that life could give. Therefore, Mariam loved Zaril.
Nana's world, on the other hand, is always full of complaints and curses; she forbids Mariam from going to school, complains about Zaril's heartlessness, and is always ruining the rare good times that Mariam and Zaril spend together. Mariam believes that Nana treats her like a tool, an object to lie to, a possession. Nana twists the truth of their lives, turning her into yet another reason for her own loathing of the world, fearing that she will be given the happiness she never had. This creates a strong desire in Mariam's heart to run away from Nana and live a bright life with Zaril.
On her fifteenth birthday, Mariam and Zaril made a promise - Zaril would pick Mariam up at noon the next day to take her to his movie theater to see Pinocchio, but Zaril broke the promise and didn't show up.
Mariam decides to go to Zariel herself. Avoiding Nana, she headed west, crossed the mountain stream, sneaked to Herat, and hitchhiked to an old man's car to Zaril's door. The driver, who opened the door, told Mariam that Zaril had gone out on an errand and would not be able to return. The stubborn Maryam sat at the door and waited all night.
Until the next morning, the immortal Maryam took advantage of the driver's not ready to run into Zaril's garden, across the grapevine, across the fishpond, across the fruit trees, she saw Zaril hidden behind the curtains on the second floor.
The driver carried Mariam to the car and drove toward the mud hut. Mariam cries all the time, crying over her shattered dreams, over Zaril's hypocrisy and heartlessness, and over the fact that she did not listen to Nana at her own peril. She finally realized that Nana was the one she should have been living with all along.
However, that's how life is: after the heartbreak, we have to endure sadness after sadness.
Nana dies, and her body hangs under the willow tree. Nana had said that if Maryam left her, she would die. With nowhere else to go, Mariam had to stay at Zaril's house, but the deep guilt was killing her. Even so, Zaril's three wives could not tolerate her. A week later, they force her to marry Rashid, a shoemaker about 30 years older than Mariam, in faraway Kabul, a place they are unlikely to meet in their lifetimes, and the curtain rises on Mariam's miserable life.
At first, Rashid is harsh and considerate towards Mariam, but after Mariam's first miscarriage, all the goodness is gone. Nana says, "Just like a compass always points north, a man's finger of blame always points to the woman."
Mariam's life took a sharp turn for the worse and she lived in the shadow of domestic violence every day.
Over the next four years, she had six more miscarriages, and Rashid wore out all his patience with alternating hope and disappointment. He forced a handful of stones into her mouth and forced her to chew them until her teeth were broken and her mouth was covered in blood.
She had been patient, enduring the endless abuse and whipping, not even crying out. Because it was the only skill Nana had taught her, "A woman's life is about learning one thing, and that's to endure."
Until another person into her life, as if the bright moonlight in the dark night, gently tear open the black curtain of her gloomy life. Let her realize, the original she is also can love and be loved, can not just endure, she also has the power to resist injustice and change fate.
Compared to Maryam, Laila's childhood was much luckier. Laila was born into a relatively democratic and happy family, with a father who was a teacher, a cheerful mother and two brothers.
Laila grew up with a New Thought education from her father, who told her, "Marriage can wait, education can't. You are a very, very smart girl. You can be whatever you want to be as you want to be. And when this war is over, Afghanistan will need you as much as it needs its men, if not more than it needs its men. Because, if the women of a society are not educated, then there is no possibility of progress in that society."
Even when stray bullets were flying, her father didn't stop educating Laila, and that became Laila's endless strength later in life.
Laila had a childhood friend named Tariq, who accidentally stepped on a landmine and blew off his leg when he was young, but Laila never disliked him. The two were always inseparable, playing and fighting. When anyone tried to bully Laila, Tariq would not hesitate to stand in front of her and protect her. In Tariq, Laila saw the dazzling light of love.
But then the war broke out, rockets landed like snowflakes, guns were fired, houses were razed to rubble, and children's limbs were scattered everywhere. Laila's two brothers are martyred, her best friend Jitti is blown to pieces, and her lover Tariq is forced to take refuge with his family in Pakistan.
As Laila's family packs up and prepares to leave, a rocket falls from the sky and shatters the house, killing both her father and mother, and crushing Laila under the rubble next to her father's body.
All the beautiful fantasies of Peshawar are reduced to pieces in this disaster.
With ulterior motives, Rashid digs Laila out and revives her. Having lost her loved ones, Laila's only hope is Tariq. But God plays a joke on her again.
A month later, a man brought a bad news - Laila loved Tariq died on the way to escape. By this time, Laila is pregnant and a part of Tariq is growing inside her. In order to give birth to this child safely, Laila is forced to marry Rashid, who is over 60 years old.
In Mariam's eyes, Laila is the third party in her marriage. She is jealous of Laila's youth and beauty, her ability to bear children, and Rashid's favoritism towards her. They live together awkwardly, coldly, and noisily, and they use each other to vent the anger and sadness of their lives. But kindness eventually helps them bridge the gap and hold each other up in the difficult years ahead.
In the spring of 1993, a girl, Aziza, is born. Once again, Rashid's desire for a son is dashed, and Laila's treatment takes a sharp turn for the worse, for which Mariam gloats in her heart.
One day when Rashid, unable to fulfill his animalistic desires, entered Mariam's room and beat her with a belt, Laila came in, held Rashid's arm in a death grip, and prevented a bloody violence. Mariam and Laila thus entered into a friendship.
Later, Mariam tells Laila that she should have adapted to this life, but Laila firmly tells her that there is no violence in her family, and that she won't adapt to it, not now, and not in the future.
The different families of origin determine their different personalities, perspectives and principles, and make them have different destinies.
Mariam unknowingly changed in the process of getting along with Laila, especially when Aziza always jumped into her arms with an expectant and delighted smile, innocently and unreservedly expressing her love for her, she, who had been as dead as death for many years, felt the true love of the human world, and felt that she was also a person who was needed. For this reason, she became brave and determined.
Together, they plot an escape. They stole Rashid's money and went to the station together to take the train. There was a rule that women were not allowed to travel without a man, so they got a man to help them at the bus station, but he lied to them.
The women were taken home by Rashid, beaten, and then locked up with their babies in an airtight dark room with no water or food for days, where the heat almost killed them.
They continued to endure Rashid's torture until Laila became pregnant again. Laila wanted to abort the child, but her motherly nature eventually overcame her hatred for Rashid.
Because of fetal malposition, Laila could only have a Caesarean section. In those days when women were treated as chattel, the government did not provide any medical equipment or resources to the gynecological hospital, and Laila was awake and endured the excruciating pain of having her belly cut open without anesthetic, and then sewed up again with a single stitch.
The woman is fragile, but the mother's love is strong. Only a mother's love can make a weak woman, endure the pain of cutting open the belly, just to let a small life see the sun.
Rashid finally had a son, longing for decades of desire finally realized, Rashid was overjoyed, but this joy was soon engulfed by a fire.
As summer comes to an end, a fire burns down Rashid's shoe store. Hunger becomes the biggest problem for their survival. To ease the burden, Rashid drops Aziza at the orphanage. Laila had to endure three or four severe beatings a day in order to visit her daughter, and was bruised all over.
Until one day, Tariq shows up on their doorstep. The girls realize that the love story of their separation was a play directed by Rashid, a ruse to take over Laila.
Laila reveals Rasheed's hidden agenda, and Rasheed tears down Laila's lie that Aziza is Tariq's child.
They wrestle, Rashid has his hands around Laila's neck, and Laila's face turns purple, her eyes roll back in her head, and she looks like she's going to suffocate.
Mariam rushed into the tool shed and grabbed a shovel. After twenty-seven years of marriage, he had already taken too much from her, and she couldn't let him take Laila again. She lifted the shovel and with all her strength, smashed it over the head of the man she hated so much. This was the first time she had decided the course of her life, and she had no regrets.
After sending Laila and her two children away, she accepted the death penalty with open arms. This weak woman of humble origins, who was tortured by inhuman encounters, was unusually brave and strong in the last part of her life, and she felt that she had finally become an important person in the eyes of others, even a hero, and she felt that dying in this way wasn't so bad.
If you can get love, is lucky. Then to dare to give love is greatness. In her own way, Mariam became a great person who got love and also gave love.
At the end of the story, Laila leaves the stability of Pakistan and returns to the devastation of Kabul, heeding Maryam's call to join Tariq in the post-war reconstruction work, and becomes a teacher at the orphanage.
She realized that Maryam was not gone, that she was in the repainted walls, in the saplings they had planted, in the children's blankets, pillows, books and pencils. Above all, she is in her heart, where she shines like a thousand suns.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is set against the backdrop of war-torn Afghanistan, spanning three decades in time and space. Through the perspectives of two women, Mariam and Laila, it interprets the lives of women struggling under the old system in Afghanistan, weaving hope into despair, carving truth into cruelty, and touching the heart.
But this is not a mere war novel, nor is it a mere story of love and redemption. The story prompts us to reflect - through the contrast between Mariam and Laila's families of origin and life destinies - on the significance of education and change.
As the author expresses in the book through the mouth of Laila's father: If the women of a society are not educated, then there is no possibility of progress in that society.
Education allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants to change society and advance civilization. Our country has also suffered the ravages of war, and the happy life we have today is the result of our predecessors' efforts to change and promote social progress and economic development.
We in a peaceful China have a happy life, but we can't stop there, just as Laila didn't end up staying in Pakistan. We can chase the kite of our dreams on the road of life, accumulate step by step for the progress of the society, and realize the transformation from "small self" to "big self" in the struggle, just like Laila who returned to the devastated Kabul without any hesitation.
The most important thing that "A Thousand Splendid Suns" teaches us is to be restless and strive for change!