Advantages of a Burqa

...In other words decent, intelligent men with integrity who shun extremism of any sort and try to do the right thing under the most impossible circumstances...

...A Thousand Splendid Suns is an aspect of Khaled Hosseini’s good works...

...And their relationship evolves, quite predictably, from suspicion and rivalry to intense love and devotion—a mother-daughter relationship the depth of a shared foxhole...

...They become the two wives of the shoemaker Rasheed, a brute and an abuser of the first order...

...When the World Trade towers crumbled to dust in front of our eyes, Afghanistan came into much sharper focus...

...Roughly two decades later, Mariam still has failed to demonstrate her worth by producing a son (or for that matter, any child at all...

...In perhaps the novel’s best scene, a woman doctor has to post a guard at the door of the operating room lest she be caught performing a Caesarean section without wearing a burqa (among countless other indignities and abuses...

...He also offers some measure of hope, and even a prescription of sorts for treatment...

...Laila is born a generation later, on April 27, 1978, the day Daoud Khan, who had overthrown his cousin the king five years earlier in a bloodless coup, is executed by the Communists as they occupy Afghanistan...

...It teaches you something, it makes you feel something and, in the end, it asks you to do something...

...In any event, the two women, virtual prisoners of their furiously violent husband spend most of the time indoors...

...But he is not unintelligent, nor is he without charm, sophistication and vulnerability—making the villain of the book its most complex and interesting character...

...Motherhood emerges as the highest ideal, not only for these two but for women in general...

...Men not so different, the reader suspects, from Dr...

...Its evocation is surprisingly exalted for a down-to-earth writer like Hosseini...

...The family settled in California, where he went on to become a physician...

...As a novelist, Hosseini has a very appealing bedside manner...

...Rasheed takes a second wife, 14year-old Laila, whose parents are killed when a rocket is fired into their house by a warring tribal group just as they are about to leave Kabul...

...She wouldn’t be recognized this way if she ran into an old acquaintance of hers...

...A Thousand Splendid Sunsis more definitively organized, with many chapter headings incorporating dates to orient the reader...

...In addition, notable references are strategically planted throughout—e.g...

...They are glaringly absent as major players in the previous work, a tale of betrayal and shame followed by atonement and redemption, centering on fathers, brothers and sons...

...Born in Kabul, the son of a diplomat and a teacher, the author came to America in 1980 when he was 15, after the bloody Communist takeover in Afghanistan...

...THE BIRTHS of Hosseini’s two protagonists here are recorded in relation to historical events: Mariam is born in the spring of 1959, “the 26th year of King Zahir Shah’s mostly uneventful 40-year reign...

...Hosseini himself...

...to deliver its message...

...This hopeless dependence of women trapped within a suffocating social structure is the factor that brings Mariam and Laila together...

...She expresses what is probably the author’s own view about him as she remembers “neighborhoods razed under his watch, the bodies dragged from the rubble, hands and feet of children discovered on the rooftops or the high branch of some tree days after their funeral...

...It is an unpretentious, highly effective example of popular fiction that educates and elevates just enough, yet entertains even more...

...But their mother, along with a great many others in Kabul (and the West as well), persists in idolizing his “handsome, thoughtful face” and “soulful black eyes...

...In an extraordinary Afterword to his novel, the author describes his recent work as a U.S...

...So the women of Afghanistan—their human tragedy and the grinding injustice inflicted on them—were the author’s obvious next big topic...

...But the bottom line in that tribal, patriarchal and fundamentalist society where women are essentially regarded as the property of men, Hosseini tells us, is that their fate has always been and remains crushing...

...In circumstances that would seem to most Westerners unendurable, the one skill a woman must learn in life, Mariam’s mother admonishes her daughter, is to “Endure...

...He is over 40 when he marries the 15-year-old Mariam, the harami or bastard daughter of a wealthy businessman, whose mother had just committed suicide...

...Using a narrative voice that is exceptionally accessible and sympathetic, he introduces us to people who are themselves moderate and enlightened...

...Thus, à la The Kite Runner, the bleeding heart of this novel is located primarily in Afghanistan’s capital during much of the 20th century’s second half and into the new millennium...

...It was a blur of tribal warlords devastating everything around them as they fought for dominance...

...Hosseini notes, probably correctly, the antifeminist advantages of the burqa from the wearer’s viewpoint: For Mariam it was a “one-way window” that “buffered [her] from the scrutinizing eyes of strangers...

...Westerners were obliged to recognize that it was no longer so far away after all, and, for good measure, to throw into its brew of suffering and wretchedness the added specter of Muslim jihadists driven by an uncontrollable charismatic figure, Osama bin Laden...

...In graphically documenting how it has spread, he keeps nothing back about the critical condition and the severity of its pain...

...Less Surprising is the author’s conception of the ideal man...

...By 2001, when Massoud is finally assassinated Laila (accused as a girl of possessing “masculine smarts”) has no illusions...

...Like a good doctor, he virtually holds your hand while straightforwardly presenting a diagnosis of his native country’s chronic malady...

...He emphatically rejects the conventional Afghani masculine paradigm, whether a petty tyrant like Rasheed or a romanticized tribal warrior like the “brooding, charismatic Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud the Lion of Panjshir,” in whose ranks Laila’s two brothers fight and are killed...

...And he appeals directly to the reader on behalf of this human rights endeavor...

...It is mournfully quoted by a character forced to flee from the intolerable battling and danger in his beloved city: “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, /Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls...

...Rasheed exploits the unfortunate circumstances of each woman...

...The title of his new book comes from a 17th-century Farsi poem extolling the enchantments of Kabul by the Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, “My Holocaust” THE STUNNING SUCCESS of Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, The Kite Runner (2003), may be attributed in part to the way it renders Afghanistan userfriendly...

...and of Taliban fanatics wielding power with all the oppressiveness of extremist conviction...

...It does not shy away from using whatever literary manipulations are necessary (suspense, pathos, melodrama, plot reversals, transparent background brief ings, moral instruction, etc...

...For Hosseini, the male ideal seems more on the order of someone similar to Mariam’s loyal teacher Mullah Faizullah or Laila’s gentle father Babi, or Zaman, the generous director of the Kabul orphanage...

...Although not particularly devout, he asserts exclusive ownership over them by anticipating the Taliban’s authoritarianism and demanding that they appear in public completely enshrouded in burqas...

...Whatever rights women might possess at one point or another are arbitrarily granted and can be just as arbitrarily withdrawn...

...Under Communist rule Afghani women fare a bit better, as Laila’s father observes when he encourages her to pursue an education...

...of Soviet occupiers and mujahedin slaughtering one another...

...The main distinguishing feature of the new novel, however, is its concentration on women...

...Until September 11, 2001, most Western readers perceived contemporary Afghanistan as an exotic place somewhere over there...

...Under the Taliban their situation is grim beyond words...

...for Laila there was “some comfort in the anonymity . . . [it] provided...

...In The Kite Runner, and now in his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini portrays characters who are caught up in all the surrounding madness and savagery, but who nonetheless possess values, aspirations and emotions Western readers can relate to...

...But there are significant differences between the two...

...an excursion to the massive Buddhas of Bamiyan before they are blown up by the Taliban, and a viewing in 1996 of the mutilated corpses of the Soviet puppet Najibullah and his brother hanging from a traffic light post in Kabul...

...envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office...

...It culminates in an act of self-sacrifice at a moment of great crisis, an act that Mariam concludes is the only recourse as she instructs Laila, who by now has two children, to “Think like a mother...

...Rasheed calls Mariam his “Volga” and Laila his “Benz,” but drives both of them with equal ferocity...