After the Kite Runner, this book by Khaled Hosseini was a bit of a disappointment for me. The author, an original afghan, may be right in portraying life as it well may be in Afghanistan, but it paints such a depressing state of affairs in that land that far from getting international attention to it, it may actually sway people into condemning it even more.
There was nothing sunny about it, seemed a huge oxymoron to call it "Thousand Splendid Suns".
Since the book is still likely to be read by many, let me touch upon only the outline here. It must be said that Khaled does write beautifully and keeps the reader's interest alive right through. A unfortunate little girl, fatherless even though she has a father, let's call her M, gets married off to R, a brutal 50 plus much married gentleman-by-a-far-cry. Fails to conceive and becomes the doormat and the broomstick of the household. While she gets older, a little girl, let's call her L meets with other unfortunate circumstances and gets into the same household as R's yet-another-wife. More brutal attacks later, the two women get closer, plan failed escapes and eventually rescue themselves from R. Even thereafter it's not a lived-happily-everafter story.
So much for a Diwali weekend reading. As soon as I put down this book, I had to pick up something light to compensate. I could only find a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru by Frank Moraes, but that's for another occasion.
Something that Khaled's book didn't do for me... Cheerio!
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