The difficult second novel by Khaled Hosseini ,after the major success of his debut The Kite Runner, could easily be a story of despair and pessimism. Instead he deliberately makes it a story of hope. As in The Kite Runner, the style of writing is deceptively simple, good old fashioned storytelling with very few frills or flourishes. The lack of colloquial expressions or difficult phrasal verbs makes it highly suitable for readers whose first language isn’t English.
Khaled Hosseini
Initially I found it less gripping than his debut but gradually the story comes to life as the lives of the two women it charts – Mariam and Laila – become indelibly linked. These two characters are used to show the terrible plight of women in Afghanistan. One of Hosseini’s ambitions for the novel is that it “brings depth,nuance, and emotional subtext to the familiar image of the burqa-clad woman walking down a dusty street“. I think he succeeds in this.
The situation for women reached a nadir in 1996 when the Taliban seized control of Kabul. A list of measures these zealots introduced is given. This includes some bizarre laws (“If you keep parakeets you will be beaten. Your birds will be killed“) alongside a general ban on displays of pleasure (singing, dancing, watching movies, kite flying etc). Men had to grow beards and pray a lot but it was the women who had to meet the most extreme prohibitions. The most debilitating of these were that girls were forbidden from attending school and women forbidden from working. In other words, women’s role was reduced to that of breeders,cooks and skivvies with zero possibility of intellectual betterment.
This is in marked contrast to a key passage earlier in the story when Babi gives the following advice to his daughter: “I know you are still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot……..Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men, maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance“.
Hosseini’s humane novel makes this a bestseller that deserves the hype.
