Manas Garg Speaks

A thousand splendid Suns is the second book by Khaled Hosseini, the amazing author of The Kite Runner.

I read this book recently, and can’t help but write about it. The style of writing is again, amazingly descriptive. You can actually see the streets of Kabul, the house where Laila lives, the time when the rocket explodes… Hosseini makes his characters so real that by the time you reach the middle of the book, you actually have a face associated with them in mind. This resembles the way Arudhanti Roy wrote in The God of Small Things, or like the great Hindi poetess Mahadevi Verma used to describe her characters in her short stories.

As his first book is about the war Afghanistan fights, this book’s plot, though affected by the war, is more about the lives of two women. Laila and Mariam. How they come close, how their lives get intwined and how they fight their common foe.

Khaled Hosseini’s writing has this novel, terrible but splendid trait – he spends a hundred pages building up a character. He gives them a name, a face, a life, a dream and hope. Then suddenly, he destroys them. Utterly and completely. You need to be steel not to cry out aloud.

The central theme that connects both the books is friendship, trust and loyality. A very satisfying read. I picked it up just before bed time, and slept only after I finished it. You’d do the same.