The novel dwells chiefly on the fate of women in Afghanistan, seen through the intertwined lives of Mariam and Laila. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a rich man in Herat (close to Iran) too proud to bring her up in his household; he therefore gives her away in marriage to a shoemaker, Rasheed, in Kabul. The other woman, Laila, is a war orphan who becomes the second wife of the same shoemaker.
We follow them through decades of hardship and political turmoil in Afghanistan, as the author exposes their travails under puppets of the Soviet Union and the sectarian warlords, while the divisions in Afghan society tear it apart. The novel is about motherhood and sacrifice, and the resilience of these two women. Mariam as the senior wife harbours a resentment for Laila as the usurper. Then slowly, the relations thaw when a child is born to Laila and two women assume an uneasy alliance initially, which blossoms into a mother-daughter relationship as time goes on.
The sadness you feel for Afghanistan is because of the regime’s intolerance of all the arts and education, coupled with a systematic subjugation of women. The Taliban, so intent on banning, have all but forgotten the times when women were doctors, university faculty, and school teachers, playing an equal role in national life. Today we only view Afghan women as blue burqa-clad dolls silently tiptoeing behind a male family member.
The author, Khalid Hosseini, was an Afghan by birth who escaped at the age of 15 with his diplomat father and grew up in the West, settling in California as a doctor. The success of his very first novel impelled him to take up writing full-time. All three of his books have have reached the bestseller charts. He is also a UNHCR goodwill ambassador. A short profile of Khalid Hosseini is here.
The title of the novel is taken from a poem by the Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi who loved Kabul and wrote a poem about it in the seventeenth century; Laila’s father Babi quotes two lines in Chapter 26 when he is forced to leave Kabul: Tabrizi’s poem had been swirling in his head all day, but all he could remember were these two lines:
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
The entire poem Kabul is a love letter to Kabul.
Tabriz is in the East Azerbaijan province of northwestern Iran
Tabriz celebrates eight famous poets (including Shams-e-Tabrizi, Rumi’s spiritual guide) with individual mausoleums erected to them. There is a graveyard in Tabriz called the Maqbaratoshoara (‘Mausoleum of Poets’) where some 400 poets and mystics are buried with famous men. We can appreciate why Persia is the origin of so much poetry and the poetic forms that have permeated the culture of of West Asia and South Asia.
Maqbarat-o-shoara, also known as the Mausoleum of Poets, built in the 1970s in Tabriz, is a monument to honour the 400 or so Iranian poets, mystics, and notable persons buried in the grounds
However Saib-e-Tabrizi is buried in Isfahan, the magical city of culture with scores of famous monuments, palaces, and mosques.
%20who%20was%20the%20greatest%20sonneteer%20of%20his%20time.%20It%20is%20home%20to%20a%20collection%20of%20around%20120,000%20couplets%20inscribed%20on%20the%20walls%20in%20marble.png)
1967 monument in Isfahan to Saib-e-Tabrizi (1592 – 1676) who was the greatest sonneteer of his time. It is home to a collection of around 120,000 couplets inscribed on the walls in marble
