51.
Apri 2003
The drought has ended. It snowed at last this past winter, knee-deep, and now it has been raining for days. The Kabul River is flowing once again. Its spring floods have washed away Titanic City.
There is mud on the streets now. Shoes squish. Cars get trapped. Donkeys loaded with apples slog heavily, their hooves splattering muck from rain puddles. But no one is complaining about the mud, no one is mourning Titanic City. We need Kabul to be green again, people say.
Yesterday, Laila watched her children play in the downpour, hopping from one puddle to another in their backyard beneath a lead-colored sky. She was watching from the kitchen window of the small two-bedroom house that they are renting in Deh-Mazang. There is a pomegranate tree in the yard and a thicket of sweetbriar bushes. Tariq has patched the walls and built the children a slide, a swing set, a little fenced area for Zalmai’s new goat. Laila watched the rain slide off Zalmai’s scalp—he has asked that he be shaved, like Tariq, who is in charge now of saying the Babaloo prayers. The rain flattened Aziza’s long hair, turned it into sodden tendrils that sprayed Zalmai when she snapped her head.
Zalmai is almost six. Aziza is ten. They celebrated her birthday last week, took her to Cinema Park, where, at last, Titanic was openly screened for the people of Kabul.
“COME ON, CHILDREN, we’re going to be late,” Laila calls, putting their lunches in a paper bag.
It’s eight o’clock in the morning. Laila was up at five. As always, it was Aziza who shook her awake for morning namaz. The prayers, Laila knows, are Aziza’s way of clinging to Mariam, her way of keeping Mariam close awhile yet before time has its way, before it snatches Mariam from the garden of her memory like a weed pulled by its roots.
After namaz, Laila had gone back to bed, and was still asleep when Tariq left the house. She vaguely remembers him kissing her cheek. Tariq has found work with a French NGO that fits land mine survivors and amputees with prosthetic limbs.
Zalmai comes chasing Aziza into the kitchen.
“You have your notebooks, you two? Pencils?Textbooks?”
“Right here,” Aziza says, lifting her backpack. Again, Laila notices how her stutter is lessening.
“Let’s go, then.”
Laila lets the children out of the house, locks the door.
They step out into the cool morning. It isn’t raining today. The sky is blue, and Laila sees no clumps of clouds in the horizon. Holding hands, the three of them make their way to the bus stop. The streets are busy already, teeming with a steady stream of rickshaws, taxicabs, UN trucks, buses, ISAF jeeps. Sleepy-eyed merchants are unlocking store gates that had been rolled down for the night. Vendors sit behind towers of chewing gum and cigarette packs. Already the widows have claimed their spots at street corners, asking the passersby for coins.
Laila finds it strange to be back in Kabul. The city has changed. Every day now she sees people planting saplings, painting old houses, carrying bricks for new ones. They dig gutters and wells. On windowsills, Laila spots flowers potted in the empty shells of old Mujahideen rockets—rocket flowers, Kabulis call them. Recently, Tariq took Laila and the children to the Gardens of Babur, which are being renovated. For the first time in years, Laila hears music at Kabul’s street corners, rubab and tabla, dootar, harmonium and tamboura, old Ahmad Zahir songs.
Laila wishes Mammy and Babi were alive to see these changes. But, like Jalil’s letter, Kabul’s penance has arrived too late.
Laila and the children are about to cross the street to the bus stop when suddenly a black Land Cruiser with tinted windows blows by. It swerves at the last instant and misses Laila by less than an arm’s length. It splatters tea-colored rainwater all over the children’s shirts.
Laila yanks her children back onto the sidewalk, heart somersaulting in her throat.
The Land Cruiser speeds down the street, honks twice, and makes a sharp left.
Laila stands there, trying to catch her breath, her fingers gripped tightly around her children’s wrists.
It slays Laila. It slays her that the warlords have been allowed back to Kabul. That her parents’ murderers live in posh homes with walled gardens, that they have been appointed minister of this and deputy minister of that, that they ride with impunity in shiny, bulletproof SUVs through neighborhoods that they demolished. It slays her.
But Laila has decided that she will not be crippled by resentment. Mariam wouldn’t want it that way. What’s the sense? she would say with a smile both innocent and wise. What good is it, Laila jo? And so Laila has resigned herself to moving on. For her own sake, for Tariq’s, for her children’s. And for Mariam, who still visits Laila in her dreams, who is never more than a breath or two below her consciousness. Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.
ZAMAN IS STANDING at the free throw line, his knees bent, bouncing a basketball. He is instructing a group of boys in matching jerseys sitting in a semicircle on the court. Zaman spots Laila, tucks the ball under his arm, and waves. He says something to the boys, who then wave and cry out, “Salaam, moalim sahib!”
Laila waves back.
The orphanage playground has a row of apple saplings now along the east-facing wall. Laila is planning to plant some on the south wall as well as soon as it is rebuilt. There is a new swing set, new monkey bars, and a jungle gym.
Laila walks back inside through the screen door.
They have repainted both the exterior and the interior of the orphanage. Tariq and Zaman have repaired all the roof leaks, patched the walls, replaced the windows, carpeted the rooms where the children sleep and play. This past winter, Laila bought a few beds for the children’s sleeping quarters, pillows too, and proper wool blankets. She had cast-iron stoves installed for the winter.
Anis, one of Kabul’s newspapers, had run a story the month before on the renovation of the orphanage. They’d taken a photo too, of Zaman, Tariq, Laila, and one of the attendants, standing in a row behind the children. When Laila saw the article, she’d thought of her childhood friends Giti and Hasina, and Hasina saying, By the time we’re twenty, Giti and I, we’ll have pushed out four, five kids each. But you, Laila, you’ll make us two dummies proud. You’re going to be somebody. I know one day I’ll pick up a newspaper and find your picture on the front page. The photo hadn’t made the front page, but there it was nevertheless, as Hasina had predicted.
Laila takes a turn and makes her way down the same hallway where, two years before, she and Mariam had delivered Aziza to Zaman. Laila still remembers how they had to pry Aziza’s fingers from her wrist. She remembers running down this hallway, holding back a howl, Mariam calling after her, Aziza screaming with panic. The hallway’s walls are covered now with posters, of dinosaurs, cartoon characters, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and displays of artwork by the orphans. Many of the drawings depict tanks running over huts, men brandishing AK-47s, refugee camp tents, scenes of jihad.
Laila turns a corner in the hallway and sees the children now, waiting outside the classroom. She is greeted by their scarves, their shaved scalps covered by skullcaps, their small, lean figures, the beauty of their drabness.
When the children spot Laila, they come running. They come running at full tilt. Laila is swarmed. There is a flurry of high-pitched greetings, of shrill voices, of patting, clutching, tugging, groping, of jostling with one another to climb into her arms. There are outstretched little hands and appeals for attention. Some of them call her Mother. Laila does not correct them.
It takes Laila some work this morning to calm the children down, to get them to form a proper queue, to usher them into the classroom.
It was Tariq and Zaman who built the classroom by knocking down the wall between two adjacent rooms. The floor is still badly cracked and has missing tiles. For the time being, it is covered with tarpaulin, but Tariq has promised to cement some new tiles and lay down carpeting soon.
Nailed above the classroom doorway is a rectangular board, which Zaman has sanded and painted in gleaming white. On it, with a brush, Zaman has written four lines of poetry, his answer, Laila knows, to those who grumble that the promised aid money to Afghanistan isn’t coming, that the rebuilding is going too slowly, that there is corruption, that the Taliban are regrouping already and will come back with a vengeance, that the world will forget once again about Afghanistan. The lines are from his favorite of Hafez’s ghazals:
Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not,
Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not.
If a flood should arrive, to drown all that’s alive,
Noah is your guide in the typhoon’s eye, grieve not.
Laila passes beneath the sign and enters the classroom. The children are taking their seats, flipping notebooks open, chattering. Aziza is talking to a girl in the adjacent row. A paper airplane floats across the room in a high arc. Someone tosses it back.
“Open your Farsi books, children,” Laila says, dropping her own books on her desk.
To a chorus of flipping pages, Laila makes her way to the curtainless window. Through the glass, she can see the boys in the playground lining up to practice their free throws. Above them, over the mountains, the morning sun is rising. It catches the metallic rim of the basketball hoop, the chain link of the tire swings, the whistle hanging around Zaman’s neck, his new, unchipped spectacles. Laila flattens her palms against the warm glass panes. Closes her eyes. She lets the sunlight fall on her cheeks, her eyelids, her brow.
When they first came back to Kabul, it distressed Laila that she didn’t know where the Taliban had buried Mariam. She wished she could visit Mariam’s grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But Laila sees now that it doesn’t matter. Mariam is never very far. She is here, in these walls they’ve repainted, in the trees they’ve planted, in the blankets that keep the children warm, in these pillows and books and pencils. She is in the children’s laughter. She is in the verses Aziza recites and in the prayers she mutters when she bows westward. But, mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
Someone has been calling her name, Laila realizes. She turns around, instinctively tilts her head, lifting her good ear just a tad. It’s Aziza.
“Mammy? Are you all right?”
The room has become quiet. The children are watching her.
Laila is about to answer when her breath suddenly catches. Her hands shoot down. They pat the spot where, a moment before, she’d felt a wave go through her. She waits. But there is no more movement.
“Mammy?”
“Yes, my love.” Laila smiles. “I’m all right. Yes. Very much.”
As she walks to her desk at the front of the class, Laila thinks of the naming game they’d played again over dinner the night before. It has become a nightly ritual ever since Laila gave Tariq and the children the news. Back and forth they go, making a case for their own choice. Tariq likes Mohammad. Zalmai, who has recently watched Superman on tape, is puzzled as to why an Afghan boy cannot be named Clark. Aziza is campaigning hard for Aman. Laila likes Omar.
But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.
For almost three decades now, the Afghan refugee crisis has been one of the most severe around the globe. War, hunger, anarchy, and oppression forced millions of people—like Tariq and his family in this tale—to abandon their homes and flee Afghanistan to settle in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. At the height of the exodus, as many as eight million Afghans were living abroad as refugees. Today, more than two million Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan.
Over the past year, I have had the privilege of working as a U.S. envoy for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, one of the world’s foremost humanitarian agencies. UNHCR’s mandate is to protect the basic human rights of refugees, provide emergency relief, and to help refugees restart their lives in a safe environment. UNHCR provides assistance to more than twenty million displaced people around the world, not only in Afghanistan but also in places such as Colombia, Burundi, the Congo, Chad, and the Darfur region of Sudan. Working with UNHCR to help refugees has been one of the most rewarding and meaningful experiences of my life.
To help, or simply to learn more about UNHCR, its work, or the plight of refugees in general, please visit: www.UNrefugees.org.
Thank you.
Khaled Hosseini
January 31, 2007
Afew clarifications before I give thanks. The village of Gul Daman is a fictional place—as far as I know. Those who are familiar with the city of Herat will notice that I have taken minor liberties describing the geography around it. Last, the title of this novel comes from a poem composed by Saeb-e-Tabrizi, a seventeenth-century Persian poet. Those who know the original Farsi poem will doubtless note that the English translation of the line containing the title of this novel is not a literal one. But it is the generally accepted translation, by Dr. Josephine Davis, and I found it lovely. I am grateful to her.
I would like to thank Qayoum Sarwar, Hekmat Sadat, Elyse Hathaway, Rosemary Stasek, Lawrence Quill, and Haleema Jazmin Quill for their assistance and support.
Very special thanks to my father, Baba, for reading this manuscript, for his feedback, and, as ever, for his love and support. And to my mother, whose selfless, gentle spirit permeates this tale. You are my reason, Mother jo. My thanks go to my in-laws for their generosity and many kindnesses. To the rest of my wonderful family, I remain indebted and grateful to each and every one of you.
I wish to thank my agent, Elaine Koster, for always, always believing, Jody Hotchkiss (Onward!), David Grossman, Helen Heller, and the tireless Chandler Crawford. I am grateful and indebted to every single person at Riverhead Books. In particular, I want to thank Susan Petersen Kennedy and Geoffrey Kloske for their faith in this story. My heartfelt thanks also go to Marilyn Ducksworth, Mih-Ho Cha, Catharine Lynch, Craig D. Burke, Leslie Schwartz, Honi Werner, and Wendy Pearl. Special thanks to my sharp-eyed copy editor, Tony Davis, who misses nothing, and, lastly, to my talented editor, Sarah McGrath, for her patience, foresight, and guidance.
Finally, thank you, Roya. For reading this story, again and again, for weathering my minor crises of confidence (and a couple of major ones), for never doubting. This book would not be without you. I love you.
This extract is taken from a speech given at Book Expo America on 2 June, 2007.
Ibegan writing like the boy in The Kite Runner, Amir. I grew up in Kabul in the 1970s, and I wrote poems and little plays that I would coax my siblings and cousins into staging for our parents at parties. I also wrote short stories, which I recall were dark, intense, even unabashedly, proudly melodramatic and, in their own childish way, dealt with issues of loyalty, friendship and class struggle. They made up for what they lacked in subtlety and style with a big, winning, expansive heart, which are words that some people have used, maybe with some justification, to describe The Kite Runner.
The language in which I’ve written has changed. I began writing in Farsi, then I wrote in French and now I mostly write in English, but one thing remains constant: I’ve always written for an audience of one. For me, writing has always been the selfish, self-serving act of telling myself a story. You know, something grabs my interest and compels me to sit down and see it through. This is how The Kite Runner was written. I had two boys in mind, one who was conflicted and on very unsure moral ground, the other pure and loyal and rooted in integrity. I knew that their friendship was doomed, that there would be a falling out and that this would impact the lives of those around them in a profound way. The how and why that would happen was the compulsion that led me to sit down and write that novel in March 2001.
I never intended to get the novel published. Even when I was as far as two-thirds of the way through writing, it never crossed my mind that anybody would actually read it although I thought my wife probably would because she loves me. So you can imagine my astonishment at the reception that The Kite Runner has received worldwide since its publication. I received letters from India, London, Sydney, Paris, Arkansas, all over the world from readers who expressed a passion to me. Many of them wanted to know how to send money to Afghanistan. Some told me they wanted to adopt an Afghan orphan. In those letters I saw the unique ability that fiction has to connect people who dress differently or practice different religions, and I saw how universal some human experiences are, like friendship, guilt, forgiveness, loss and atonement.
In those letters, I also saw how I had unwittingly placed myself in a daunting position—that of following up The Kite Runner, and writing a book that, through no fault of its own, would bear the burden of comparison to The Kite Runner, while the ink was still wet on its pages. The reading of every fan letter I received was punctuated by a loud and anxious gulp and a feeling of pity for this as-yet-unwritten novel. I feared for the sanity of my family who would have to bear with me as I set about writing this new book.
I had further complicated matters by deciding on a narrative that demanded not one but two central characters, both of them women. This was a decision that I’d made when I was putting the final edits on The Kite Runner—a father and son story set exclusively in the world of men. I wanted to write another love story set in Afghanistan but this time a mother/daughter tale and about the inner lives of two struggling Afghan women. I suppose there were some easier roads I could have gone down, but I chose this one because, both as a writer and as an Afghan, I couldn’t think of a more riveting or important or compelling story than the struggle of women in my country. Dramatically speaking, every other topic paled in comparison.
Unfortunately the image of the burqa-wearing woman walking past the stern, glaring face of the Taliban official has become familiar around the world, perhaps even iconic. When I was in Kabul in 2003, I met a man who worked as a bodyguard for a government official. He told me, kind of casually, a story about a woman he had seen beaten by a Taliban official on the street. In telling that story, he used a rather grisly if colorful expression. He said he beat her until her mother’s milk leaked out of her bones. In listening to that story it seemed unreal to me that this happened in Kabul. Not long ago, women in Afghanistan were professors at universities, they were doctors and lawyers, worked in hospitals, taught at schools and played an important role in society. They were women like my mother, who was university educated and a teacher of Farsi and history, eventually becoming the vice principal of a very large high school for girls. But that was in Kabul, and Afghanistan is not a nation of urbanized middle-class people. There has always been an ideological gap between liberal reformist Kabul and rural Afghanistan. The sad truth is that the Taliban-style oppression of women in certain regions of Afghanistan existed long before the Taliban was even a twinkle in the loving eye of the Pakistani secret intelligence. Whereas Kabul has been, relatively speaking, a hub for female autonomy, rural Afghanistan, especially south and east along the border with Pakistan, has been traditionally a patriarchal tribal region where men have decided the fates of women.
There, women have always lived in confinement. They have always worn the burqa on the street and rarely gone to school beyond the age of twelve so there was rampant illiteracy in those areas. For centuries, women there have been told when they will marry, who they will marry, and, incidentally, for how much. For the most part, rural Afghan women have led quiet, subterranean lives of obedience and service.
This may surprise you but throughout the last century there were multiple attempts to liberate, as it were, the women of Afghanistan, originating in Kabul. There was a king named Amanullah in the 1920s who actually banned the wearing of the burqa in public. He built the first hospital for women and the first school for girls. He brought teachers over from Europe and sent women to Europe to get an education. Amanullah tried to ban forced marriage, raise the minimum marrying age for girls to sixteen and ban the practice of bride price. Unfortunately, largely as a result of these attempts, there was a rebellion and he was run out of town. He ended up dying an old man in exile.
There were other attempts in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, some of which had fruition. In 1964, Afghan women gained the right to vote. But Kabul’s reforms have always been met by the patriarchal tribal leaders with mockery, contempt or in some cases mutiny, as in the case of poor King Amanullah.
So, as you can see, life was a struggle for some women in Afghanistan well before the Taliban. But it became all but unbearable with the outbreak of factional war, anarchy and extremism. In many ways, that’s when disaster really struck.
Women suffered not only through the bombings and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas like everyone else, not only were beaten and tortured and humiliated and imprisoned, not only had their fundamental human rights violated over and over again, but in large numbers also suffered from gender-based abuse. They were abducted and sold as slaves, forced into marriage to militia commanders, forced into prostitution, and raped, a crime particularly heinous and unforgivable that was used to intimidate families who were opposed to one faction or another.
Today in post-Taliban, post-9/11 Afghanistan there is talk again of liberating women, as there should be. The gender apartheid that has been forced on Afghan women has been one of the great unresolved injustices of the modern world. In addition, Afghanistan needs its women.
The whole project of rebuilding Afghanistan is doomed if the fundamental human rights of its women are not respected and its women are not allowed to participate.
Queen Soraya, wife of King Amanullah, said: “Do not think, however, that our nation needs only men to serve it. Women should also take their part, as women did in the early years of Islam. The valuable services rendered by women are recounted throughout history. And from their examples, we learn that we must all contribute toward a development of our nation.” The Queen said those words back in 1926 and it seems to me that her words are as relevant eighty years later, and perhaps even more so than they were back then.
I returned to Kabul in 2003 and met people from all walks of life, and I remember standing at street corners and seeing fully covered women walking along, trailed by four, five, six, seven children. I remember thinking, who is that person inside? What has she seen? What has she endured? What makes her happy? What gives her sorrow? What are her hopes, her longings, her disappointments? A Thousand Splendid Suns is in some ways my attempt at imagining answers to those questions. It’s my attempt to explore the inner lives of these two fictional women and look for the very ordinary humanity beneath their veils.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is very, very dear to me. It has been a labor of love, and I hope that it doesn’t sound too pretentious if I say that I think of it as my modest tribute to the great courage, endurance and resilience of Afghanistan.
I hope that I will engage you, that I will transport you and that the novel will move you and leave you with some sense of compassion and empathy for Afghan women whose suffering has been matched by very few groups in recent world history.
Khaled Hosseini
In brief
Mariam is a harami, an illegitimate child, who only sees her adored father once a week. On those precious days they go fishing, he reads to her and gives her beautiful presents, but she can never live with him. She decides to visit his home, a visit he does not acknowledge, and returns to find that her mother has hanged herself. Determined that she will not secure a place in their household, her father’s wives marry her off to Rasheed, an elderly widower from Kabul, far enough away for Mariam to be safely forgotten. It is a marriage that soon deteriorates into brutality and misery made worse for Mariam by Rasheed’s decision to also marry the orphaned Laila. When Laila disappoints Rasheed by bearing a daughter, she too finds herself the target of his cruelty. But out of this unhappy household grows a friendship which will bind the two women in a union as close as any marriage, and which will endure beyond death. Written in often lyrical prose, Khaled Hosseini’s second novel weaves thirty years of turbulent Afghan history through an intensely powerful story of family, friendship and, ultimately, hope.
Background
Khaled Hosseini’s reputation as an accomplished storyteller has already been well and truly established with The Kite Runner, his celebrated debut novel written in the early hours before setting off for his “day job” as a doctor. Brought up in a tradition of storytelling, Hosseini has described this tradition as first and foremost what writing novels is about. It is a quality central to A Thousand Splendid Suns which seamlessly blends the compelling narratives of Mariam and Laila with the deeply troubled history of Afghanistan over the past thirty years. Hosseini has described writing the novel as “an even more satisfying experience for me than the writing of The Kite Runner, because it was a more complex and ultimately unexpected journey.”
With his first novel Hosseini had wanted to give a Western public assailed with media images of war-torn Afghanistan, firstly during the Soviet occupation and then under the Taliban, a glimpse of the country he remembered from childhood and to dispel some of the misconceptions that some of his adopted countrymen had about it. Many of those misconceptions were about women who had not suffered repression before the Taliban seized power, contrary to popular Western belief. During what many have called the “Golden Years” of the 1960s and 70s, women actively contributed to Afghan society—Hosseini’s mother, for example, taught at a girls’ school—and their rights had been confirmed in a new constitution in the mid-1970s. It is the role of women that Hosseini has chosen to explore in his second novel and he does so vividly through the stories of Mariam and Laila, two women separated by a generation but united by an unbreakable bond of friendship. These two endure not only the brutality of their husband Rasheed, but also the appalling atrocities of the Taliban, yet remain resilient and true to themselves.
Hosseini’s family sought asylum in the United States in 1980 shortly after the Soviet invasion. Hosseini returned to Afghanistan after a twenty-seven year absence, following the fall of the Taliban, partly to satisfy a yearning to see his homeland again but also to find out how it was faring. He came back to the United States with a sense of optimism although not as much as he had hoped for, citing the security situation and the narcotics trade as two causes for grave concern.
About the author
Khaled Hosseini was born in 1965 in Kabul where his father was a diplomat and his mother taught Farsi and history. After the 1978 coup and the subsequent Russian invasion, the family fled Afghanistan for the United States, receiving political asylum in 1980. They settled in San Jose, California where his father found work as a driving instructor. Hosseini is a doctor and lives with his wife and two children in Northern California. The Kite Runner, his first novel, has been met with great critical and popular acclaim.
For discussion
• The novel opens with the sentence, “Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.” How important is that word in the novel? How does Mariam’s illegitimacy shape her life?
• “The next time Mariam signed her name to a document, twenty-seven years later, a mullah would again be present”. Khaled Hosseini foreshadows events, both domestic and national, at many points throughout A Thousand Splendid Suns. What effect does this have?
• “But it was the women who drew Mariam’s eyes the most”. What is it that fascinates Mariam about the women of Kabul, and why does it capture her attention? How are women treated by the various regimes that take control of Afghanistan? How are the main female characters portrayed in the novel? To what extent do these portrayals differ from any preconceptions that you may have had about women in Afghanistan?
• Mariam protests at the idea of marrying Rasheed, begging her father not to force her. What kind of husband does he prove to be? How does she come to feel about him? How does their marriage change? Why do you think Rasheed behaves in the way that he does?
• “And in this fleeting, wordless exchange with Mariam, Laila knew that they were not enemies any longer”. How is the deep bond between Mariam and Laila forged? How does this bond sustain both of them?
• How does the observation of Islam in Kabul differ from Mariam’s hometown of Herat? What part does religion play in her life? How important is it in the novel?
• “To me, it’s nonsense – and very dangerous nonsense at that – all this talk of I’m Tajik and you’re Pashtun and he’s Hazara and she’s Uzbek. We’re all Afghans, and that’s all that should matter”, Laila’s father tells her. How important is this ethnic diversity both in the novel and in what happens to Afghanistan throughout the thirty years the book spans?
• What is the significance of the novel’s title? Why do you think Hosseini chose it?
• What do you think of the novel’s ending?
• How would you describe Hosseini’s writing style? Were there particular passages that impressed you and if so what were they and why?
• How are the West and the Soviet Union portrayed in the novel? What part do they play in Afghanistan’s troubles?
• Hosseini is an expatriate Afghan. To what extent do you think this has influenced the writing of A Thousand Splendid Suns, and his portrayal of Afghanistan?
Resources
• www.khaledhosseini.com– Khaled Hosseini’s website
• www.barnesandnoble.com/writers/writerdetails.asp?z=y&cid=1145572#interview – interview published on Barnes and Noble’s website
• www.afghanmagazine.com/2004_06/profile/khosseini.shtml – conversation with Farhad Ahzad published on afghanmagazine.com
• www.bloomsbury.com/Authors/microsite.asp?id=480§ion=1&aid=863 – conversation between Hosseini and Riverhead Books, his American publisher
•http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_ asia/1162108.stm – Afghanistan timeline published at the BBC’s website
Suggested further reading
Fiction
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Married Woman by Manju Kapur
The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle
Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra
Non-fiction
The Sewing Circles of Herat by Christina Lamb The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
Other books by Khaled Hosseini
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and moved to the United States in 1980. His first novel, The Kite Runner, was an international bestseller, published in thirty-four countries. In 2006 he was named a US goodwill envoy to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
He lives in Northern California.
Chapter 51
问题
1. What has Laila done with Mariam’s money?
2. Summarize what Laila and her family are doing now.
3. How does the novel end?
翻译
1. The drought has ended. It snowed at last this past winter, knee-deep, and now it has been raining for days.
2. Sleepy-eyed merchants are unlocking store gates that had been rolled down for the night. Vendors sit behind towers of chewing gum and cigarette packs.
3. Laila yanks her children back onto the sidewalk, heart somersaulting in her throat.
要求：
1. 尽量回答上面问题
2. 思考：
至此，这本小说就全剧终啦！ 一千个灿烂的阳光能否驱散阿富汗的硝烟所带来的黑暗，唯有爱才能让我们看到这灿烂千阳。 ”喀布尔每条街道都令人目不转睛/埃及来的商旅穿行过座座市场/人们数不清她的屋顶有多少轮皎洁明月/也数不清她的墙壁之后那一千个灿烂的太阳”这首诗歌节选自17世纪著名诗人米尔扎·穆罕默德·阿里赛依伯的诗人《喀布尔》，曾经多么美好的一个地方。诗歌中“一千个灿烂的太阳”比喻美丽的喀布尔妇女，作者引用了这首诗中“一千个灿烂的太阳”作为他第二本书的标题，多么温暖美好的一个名字，但是书中的主人公却没有那么幸运。
