A Thousand Splendid Suns; by Khaled Hosseini.

Having explored sensitive problems and horrors of male life in The Kite Runner, this one is about the downtrodden gender across time and geographical boundaries, still with the same background of Afghanistan from seventies to recent times in the country, one of the most turbulent times in the history of the land and that is saying something - we are talking about the crossroads of the huge continent of Asia here. Before Arabs invaded and converted it to Islam it was a Buddhist land offering respite to silk route travellers in the various monasteries strewn around central Asia - Bamian, Bukhaaraa, ... - and a flourishing home of learning, arts, world trade. Most people do wish to live in peace and attempt to keep up the learning, arts et al, except some lands are almost cursed in that the turbulence keeps invading in form of various armies criss crossing time and again. Kansas has tornadoes, central Asia has humans invading and occupying from east and west.

Yet it is a beautiful land, as seen through the rosy memories of the writer who clearly loves its various features from snow to desert, orchards and fields. This book coupled with the other more famous one of his (TKR) makes one almost wish one could instantly travel and see all that he is writing about, even though one is aware it is no longer the same - not only he rues it but that is all one has been familiar with unless one is another expat Afghan. The ravaged land with trees and fields of life sustaining fruits and grains and so on replaced by tanks and guns and bombings and opium fields that help the drug-gun trade prosper. Bamian Buddha has been destroyed quite deliberately, in between all other destructions of towns and humanity, and in the place of peace is now desolation and destitution which is all this sort of war and coup ideology, supported with gun and drug trade, can bring. People try desperately to survive, by staying on for the love of land or leaving with a heavy heart for safer shores until one can return.

The writer begins this one with the most downtrodden possible a person, an illegitimate daughter of a servant by a master who is doing penance through giving the mother and daughter provisions for life as long as they do not intrude on his legitimate life of respectability. Still, the girl knows no sorrow or downturn of life except the bitter mother who keeps telling her truths she won't acknowledge - children need to love and dream, to survive, and the truths are bitter. When she sets forth to make one dream come true, a small enough one at that - have her father take her to a film in one of his theatres with his other children, see the film together, eat ice cream - she is faced with devastating realities of her life none of which are her fault, and loses her mother and pretty soon any possibility of a real life. She tries to make life as best as possible, but innocent downtrodden ones are not necessarily spared by providence and she loses the one happiness she could have had, children and any possibility thereof.

The writer jumps to the life of a younger neighbour inexplicably and one wonders if this was a composition brought together in a book form but initially consisting of separate connected stories. Then with more happenings of history the two are woven together like the simple braiding of hair with different sections brought together. How fifteen year old are forced to grow up and make very adult decisions and choices to survive, to find what happiness they can and to protect those they must, is a reminder of how the world lives beyond the teenage haven of US with cars and malls and proms and popularity their only concerns. Here in this story, education is a luxury not everyone has, and in fact the most liberal fathers of daughters are forced by the bombings and missiles to keep their daughters home finally, and teach them privately. Young males of course have gone to war and died, or lost limbs early in life with land mines. Or died trying to escape it to safer lands.

The meanness, the petty cruelty and nasty tricks of the male largely looming in the lives of the two women is symbolic of a class hatred for no reason that the lesser male feels for the higher whom he can conquer only in one way, by raping the women that belong to their class - and even better, doing so within marriage so the women have little if any chance of escape, it is their own life, their own husband, father of their child or many dead ones. The elder one is daughter of a richer one and in some way higher class in that she speaks Farsi (Persian), and does not speak Pashto; the younger one is not only half the age of the elder one, who in turn is less than half the age of the male who married them, but is also the daughter of a teacher, with an educated mother and is being educated herself, has a friend she loves, and is beautiful - and he clearly hates all of the superior qualities of this one, and tricks her into marrying him by having someone tell her a false tale about her love being dead.

This level of petty cruelty, nasty evil mindset, comes only from a lesser person who knows he is lesser and hates the superior ones for it, questioning their assumption of superiority - but if he had it in him to aspire to their level nothing could stop him, in fact the teacher would encourage and help the neighbour. It couldn't be that difficult for a man who owns a reasonably prosperous business and is in demand to find some time for rising above what he suspects is a low station by being well read, but he prefers to spend the time on porn and hates the better ones. The difference is not that the better ones think they are above, it is that the lesser one not only knows it he would rather trample them in the worst way he can think of and thus equate the better ones with dust under his feet.

And yet this does not satisfy him, so he goes on to be more cruel and manipulative and nasty in petty ways that hurt his wives but do not benefit him in any way. All this would be unbelievable if one has not met such persons but they unfortunately are all too real, and exist across all differences of geography, nationality, class, rank, caste by any other name, community and faith and colour of skin or eyes or hair, gender or power or wealth. When it is a male empowered by his society to brutalise his wives and daughters it all takes more dimensions of cruelty, and this writer describes them in detail enough to make one cringe.

Another reader's review made one believe it all ends well, and so the failure of the women in escaping together was a severe disappointment while the death of the senior wife in helping the others live by murdering the husband left the tale with its final blow of tragedy, in that she was not only one of the two protagonists but also had finally nothing. One finds solace in the junior wife and her daughter finding the friend-lover-father of the daughter again, in that he was not dead, and their escape to a better life, until they return to rebuild the nation - but the tale has suffered irreparable losses in losing Mariam pretty much the way the nation has lost much. Humanity cannot give up, life does not, and a nation must grow its life back from its roots, as they do in the final part of this story. But one must remember those that gave life so others could survive, too.