“A Thousand Splendid Suns” is American Afghan writer Khaled Husseini after “The Kite Runner” another moving novel, the theme of the story is still the background of the war, the spread of thirty years of war in Afghanistan brought people disaster and painful memory, after reading let a person full of emotions.
It’s a female-led story about family, friendship, faith, and, in an inexcusable era, the unbreakable love between two awkward women born of the same tragedy that leaves us wondering whether to rejoice, lament or lament them.
Let’s take a look at this story, Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.
Two heroines appear successively in the story: Mariam and Lila.
Mariam, who was the “Halami” in her mother’s eyes, was only five years old at the time, but she did not know that her mother spit out the three words is “bastard” meaning.
Yes, Mariam was born out of wedlock with another woman, her mother, outside the family. It was not her fault, but doomed her to a miserable life. On her fifteenth birthday, she was not satisfied with her father’s weekly visit. In order to get more love from her father, she left her mother and took refuge in her father. When she left, her mother committed suicide and she began a different life — her father married her at the age of 15 to Rashid, a middle-aged shoemaker in his 40s. From then on, Maryam lived in the midst of brutal domestic violence in war-torn Kabul…
Lila, was born to a neighbor of Mariam’s shortly after marriage. When she was growing up, the war made her lose two brothers, the shell also took the lives of her parents, so the 14-year-old girl in Rashid elaborate hoax, forced to marry the 60-year-old Rashid.
Not long after the marriage, Laila gave birth to her and Rashid’s titular daughter Azisha…
The two women went from hating each other to warming to each other.
Two women in different times, in the war and domestic violence of the double disaster and patience, the pain and suffering interwoven, born a warm and precious affection to come.
For Maryam, Rashid was her husband even though he was cold and rough with her. In Afghanistan at that time, under the strong pressure of the patriarchal society on women, Maryam, like so many women who lost themselves, had to identify the man in front of her, and at the same time, fate also drove her to spend time with him day by day. And wait until the appearance of Lila, Mary Yam seems to feel her “identity”, “status” by the challenge, and began to oppose the girl.
At first they were indeed in opposition to each other and hated each other for a long time. But when Lila gave birth to a daughter, rather than a son, Rashid’s attitude towards Lila changed rapidly, when the domestic violence began, the same suffering will be the two women’s hearts slowly into a place, this affection from the initial slightly warm gradually expanded, thus producing a thousand sun like brilliant light.
When patience reaches its limits, despair miraculously leads to rebirth.
Mariam and Leila’s story, spanning three decades of war in Afghanistan, is that two women of very different ages married the same man in their late 40s and late 60s. That alone, we can’t stand it.
In the book, we deeply feel that women in Afghanistan are not guaranteed even the most basic human rights and have little personal freedom. During the war, you had to go out with a family man or risk being locked up, not to mention brutal domestic violence. At that time, domestic violence was how common ah! Even if a wife were brutally killed, it would be officially dismissed as a family matter!
And the war, more to Afghanistan’s women brought brutal persecution. It can be imagined that Mariam and Lila is in such a living environment, they endure pain, hunger and fear all the time, finally, in a domestic violence, when Rashid almost strangled Lila, Mariam with a spade raised high will be beast of big Rashid killed.
What a thrilling three-way battle it was!
At this point, the endurance of the two women over the years has reached its limit, and both of them are on the road to self-redemption. Mariam for Lila and the children to pay their own life, but like a new life, because she feels that the previous life seems never really existed, but in their two people against Rashid’s desperate resistance, her life just opened.
And for Lila, Mariam’s sacrifice not only gave her peace and hope, although she left them forever, but permanently retained in her heart, where she sent out a thousand sun like brilliant light.
At the end of the book, there is a quote that gives a clear sense of hope and power:
John will return to Canaan. Do not mourn;
The shed will return to the rose house, please don’t mourn;
If a flood is coming, engulfing all life;
Noah’s Ark is your guide in the eye of the storm. Do not mourn.
Yes, at the end of the story, the war is over, Lyra and her children see hope for a new life, and her sad fate is miraculously changed, because she finally meets her first love!
The war had torn them apart so cruelly, and they had lived a long and miserable life together, but when the war had subsided and things had changed for the better, they were able to hold each other’s hand and move forward. Together, they returned to Kabul to take part in the post-conflict transformation.
In addition to every Afghan’s story of death, loss and unimaginable sorrow during the war, Laila had the hope and strength of her Maryam, the sister she was supposed to be, but the mother and daughter she loved. Although she did not know where the Taliban buried Maryam’s body, she was living in her heart, watching what she had done for the restoration of Kabul — she was in her heart, shining a thousand SUNS on their collective path to self-salvation.