06/10/2007

'Splendid Suns' shines

BY ELIZABETH KANE BUZZELLI

Special to the Record-Eagle

"A Thousand Splendid Suns,” a new novel by Khaled Hosseini ("The Kite Runner”), is a mood I was loathe to enter.

Afghanistan and the lives of the women from the Soviet invasion through the horror of the infighting of the warlords, to the Taliban, the invasion of the Americans and the American-backed return of the warlords, wasn't a place I wanted to go. But there I was, asked to review this book, agreeing, and then finding myself deep into such depravity that the whole of human history seemed captured in this one place, in the lives of two women: Laila and Mariam, victims of a male world so corrupted by power, it would cost one her life, the other any dreams of happiness she'd ever dared to dream.

Laila and Mariam were born not too many years apart — Mariam in a kolba, a mud hut in the country, where her childhood is one of shame because her mother bore her out of wedlock. Though her father visits, he will not claim her as his own, and upon the suicide of her mother, arranges a marriage to a cobbler, Rasheed, from far-off Kabul. The marriage takes Mariam, who always dreamed of going to school and someday teaching, into a true slavery with no freedom of body, mind or soul.

Laila lives happily in Kabul with her family and her friend Tariq, a boy who has already lost a leg to an earlier war. When the Soviets pull out of Afghanistan, the warlords from neighboring territories lay claim to the city. Killing, mutilation, destruction — one faction of the other — begin.

Laila's family is killed in the bombing. Tariq leaves the city to protect his parents. Laila, taken into the home of Rasheed, where Mariam nurses her back to health, is offered no choice for a future but to become the second wife of Rasheed.

Mariam has produced no children. Laila is quickly pregnant. Laila and Mariam begin their life together, wives of this man who is cruel, beats them at will, and when they try to escape him, locks them into boiling hot rooms for three days with no food or water. Such is their life.

The Taliban chase out the warlords, and the plight of the Afghan women grows even worse. Not only is there the burqa to tolerate, but they cannot leave their homes without a male relative accompanying them. They cannot work. Schools for girls are closed. No one may listen to music, the arts are banned, no one can laugh in public without being beaten.

Executions are public, done in the infamous Ghazi Stadium to the roar of the crowd. It's a sound Mariam will come to know.

Most of the hospitals are reserved for men. A lone hospital in Kabul treats women, but there is no sanitation, no medicine, no antibiotics. When Laila must have a cesarean section at the birth of her second child, she is cut open without benefit of anesthesia. The woman doctor who operates on her has been ordered to operate from under the burqa. Taking her own life in her hands, she removes it, one of the small rebellions buoying such lives.

But this isn't a book of a single plot line, of identifiable sub-plots. It doesn't read like fiction at all, or should I say it reads like the best of all possible fiction: Tolstoy, Flaubert.

I am painfully caught in the world of these women. My world is touched for days and hours after I've finished the book. It is too immediate — the world of these women. This is a story of the 21st century, not gruesome tales from the dark ages. As these women are pounded back to some prehistoric age where only the ability to survive is left, I had children in well-tended hospitals, lived in houses with running water and TVs and electricity and bathrooms. As they scanned a limited view from under folds of cloth, I contemplated wearing slacks or skirts or whatever I pleased. As I groused about the neighbors' noise, or about a government installing terrible answering machines in their offices, Laila followed Rasheed through the streets of Kabul, seeing only the back of her cruel husband's head from the small burqa grill. Her world is miniscule, now reduced to the woman who has become her friend, Mariam, their crumbling house, fear of their shared husband and an animal loyalty to her daughter and son.

To try to escape this grotesque life, no matter how well thought-out months in advance, proves useless and almost deadly. To try to live with Rasheed's rages, his ugly needs, is mind-numbing. But when there is no choice, it only takes a simple thing like the women's friendship to get them through; to get them to a place where decision is no longer an option.

If I must quibble with anything, it would be the inclusion of the last eight pages. I lose interest when a writer tries to tie a compelling book up with a bow. I didn't need the message to a dead Mariam from the father who'd abandoned her.

As an exercise in pure literary experience, watch as Hosseini weaves together all parts of the story. Bits from the first of Mariam's life twine with the latter years of Laila's. Parts of Laila's dream becoming a slight reality at last.

As a strange exercise in beauty, Hosseini is eloquent beyond hope and "A Thousand Splendid Suns” is awash with aching tenderness. Visiting Mariam's poor hut in later years, Laila sits among the blowing leaves, the rotting floorboards, the wall where smudged Soviet graffiti is written, and imagines this true friend as she had been when a child:

Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll's head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too has had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed.

Already Laila sees something behind this young girl's eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. It's something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila's salvation.

If this book doesn't tear your heart out, you don't have one.

Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli will be teaching "Let's Write Fiction” for seventh- through ninth-grade students the week of July 16 through Northwestern Michigan College Extended Education. She can be reached at ebuzzelli@aol.com.