A Thousand Splendid Suns will no doubt make an excellent film – certainly there are enough twists and turns in the narrative to keep movie-goers on the edge of their seats for two plus hours. But the events that work well on the screen do not always make for great literature. As a novel, Hosseini’s work is a cardboard set-up of stock crises, often handled in the most emotionally manipulative manner.
Except for Mariam’s parents, all of the other characters are painted in cartoonish black-and-white strokes -- cardboard heroes and villains -- with little depth and virtually no moments of introspection. The major figures are stock ones: the evil husband, the noble teacher, the close-minded mullah, etc., and within a few paragraphs we can already predict their every thought and action with dispiriting accuracy.
Every twenty pages or so, a jarring disaster occurs – a major character’s torso is blown across the room by a random bomb, another one languishes in a refugee camp, or suffers a terrible illness. True, the novel moves ahead at an unrelenting pace, and the plot is full of incidents, but these are piled on top of one another with all the subtlety of a soap opera storyline.
I wish I liked A Thousand Splendid Suns more. Hosseini impresses me as a caring, principled person, who has devoted his time and energy to helping the United Nations Refugee Agency, and his novel shows admirable sensitivity to the plight of women in Islamic societies. But great fiction requires more than good intentions. Hosseini closes his book with an afterword which comes across as a public service announcement for the United Nations. By all means, take his advice and give generously to his preferred charity. But if you are picking out your summer reading list, give this one a pass.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!
2 - Zivon
I have to totaly disagree with the article above. I loved A Thousand Splendid Suns, Every page of it. Once I was about 5 or 6 and I couldnt stop reading. It is a ture story of human emotion and bond, at tiems like this and in an age of a decline in novel publishing and readership in general this story re ignites the fires in readers heart and will give the market a whole new spin.