Thoughts After Reading "A Thousand Splendid Suns"

OK, so I cried at the end, I admit. Hosseini finally got to me, a bit shamelessly, but I think Mariam deserved the attention she finally got, albeit belatedly. 

Reading this novel was a really strange experience for me. I found myself getting really annoyed with the author. When I got to the part where Mariam refused to see her father and tore up his letter without reading it, I actually got angry. This was after the scene where Mariam and Rasheed go to all the trouble of walking to a hotel and borrowing a phone to try and call Jalil (Mariam's father) to ask for financial help--to keep the family from starving--it's a big build-up, and you think, finally, maybe at last, these poor wretches will get some help, only to find out that Jalil is dead and gone, and that whole segment where the reader clings to a little hope for some sort of relief was for naught. 

Angry at the author for manipulating me into a false hope? 

I've never read a novel where I actually found myself wanting to pray for the protagonists. Pray for a character in fiction? How bizarre is that? Yet that's how I felt for Mariam and Laila when they were about to run away from Rasheed. You just knew this wasn't going to be easy in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. I walked away from the book, dreaded starting up again. And of course, I was right, it didn't go well for these women. 

Nothing, it seemed, would go right, especially for Mariam. 

Angry at the author because he seemed determined to make life as miserable for these women as he possibly could. Unrelenting sorrow, unrelenting humiliation. Like a cruel, sadistic puppeteer, he never let up. 

But perhaps that was his point. He pulled back the veil that shrouds western eyes from the cruelty of the Taliban, the indignities women especially but men as well experience in these horribly oppressive societies. 

Reading this novel made me so thankful for freedoms I barely think of as freedom: freedom to step outside my door, get in my car, run a quick errand, wear what I want, say what I think, watch and read and write and wear and eat and sleep when and where and what I want. 

Thankful for my beautiful America. 

I did cry at the end, for Mariam, a sad, wretched and, ultimately, heroic woman.