I was first introduced to Khaled Hosseini on the 19th of March, my birthday. A friend got me A Thousand Splendid Suns as a gift. I actually got two books from two friends, so I settled for the other book as my first read.
I started reading A Thousand Splendid Suns about two weeks after, and that was how I got hooked. Then and there, I knew I had found a new love in Khaled Hosseini’s works. Like someone under the influence, I started searching for all of his books because I was craving more from him. I just couldn’t afford to read him once and drop him off. I wanted more, and I found more. Within a month, I read his first three books—The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed.
A Thousand Splendid Suns was my first. It tells the story of two Afghan women and the kind of life they were subjected to because of the nature of their birth (Mariam being a harami), because of the war, and because of the way women were regarded. The first heartbreak I encountered was the way Mariam was subjected to humiliation by her father whom she worshipped and then sent off in marriage to a man in his late forties or thereabout when she was 15. How about the abuse and the life of silence and subservience. At a time I was hoping for the death of one of the characters because what manner of gross wickedness was he displaying? At a later time, I came in contact with Laila, and the manner in which her life was tragically altered almost squeezed the blood from my body dry. She was my favourite character.
The book would keep you flipping pages—you don’t want to drop something that good to do something else. I felt I was in Afghanistan watching a true to life movie. Despite the sadness the book evoked, I wanted to hold it close, sleep with it clutched to my chest and wake up to it.
I took a day break after I finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns so I could do some personal writing. I picked up The Kite Runner on a Saturday evening and it was another intense one. The only reason I did not read into the night like I do when I can’t help myself with a book that has me on a hook was that I didn’t want to wake up late for church. I read a few pages before going out, and the story was playing in my head. On Monday—the day I finished the book, I stayed coiled up under my duvet after slipping two pills of Panadol down my throat to stop the cramps I was having. My companion in bed was The Kite Runner. Nothing can separate me from a good book.
The story is about two Afghan boys. The themes explored are trust, loyalty, betrayal, forgiveness and redemption. There were times when the pursuit for forgiveness was too late, and other times when redemption had to occur. The thing with this book is that as a reader, you feel you know the character so well, but in the end, you figure that the character is not who you think he is. I would have mentioned the character who stood out in this way for me, but it might be a spoiler. You have to read the book for yourself. A caveat here though. If you’re triggered by content about sexual abuse, you might not want to read this book.
Guess what happened when I finished The Kite Runner? I thought I could take a break from Khaled and read Charles Dickens. I started The Tale of Two Cities the night I finished Khaled but I managed to read the first two chapters when Khaled called me again in the third book, And the Mountains Echoed. Just because I didn’t want to spend my whole day reading since I had my writing to do, I decided to use the book as my reward. I told myself that if I could start working on a project I had at hand, then I could read the book afterwards. No writing, no reading.
I started reading And the Mountains Echoed the following night after I finished The Kite runner, but it took me ten days to see the end of it. My relationship with this book was not like the others and I was putting it away for days and picking it up when I felt like it. My clinginess didn’t show up here. The story was like a game of connecting the dots/puzzle, and it did connect at the end, but I had a lot of brain work to do in remembering characters and where they’d shown up before and how they fit in.
The style is also different. Khaled carried the readers along in the cycle through the eyes of different characters—5 or 6 of them, if not more. This gave more depth to the story because there were several plots and subplots that were related. One quote that stood out for me in this book is, “If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside.” That hit deep for me partly because I struggle to speak my own language. A pointer to learn.
Have you read any of these books? Do you want to share your experience with them? Would you be reading any of these books? Let me know.
On to the next book. Recommendations are welcome.
Adios.
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