A thousand shining suns
A Thousand Splendid Suns is the second novel of the Afghan - American writer Khaled Hosseini , after his international bestseller The Kite Runner by 2003. The novel was published in 2007 in English ( A Thousand Splendid Suns) and was translated in the same year by Michael Wind streets into German.
The novel is about the fate of two women in shattered Afghanistan over the past few decades. One of the women is the illegitimate Mariam. She is married to Rashid by her father at the age of fifteen after her mother's suicide. Rashid is thirty years older than her and works as a shoemaker in Kabul . Twenty years later, Laila enters her life. Laila lost her parents in a bombing and marries Rashid as his second wife. In the new household, the two protagonists develop an intimate friendship under the violent Rashid.
Hosseini has noted that he regards the novel as a "mother-daughter story", in contrast to its predecessor, the Kite Runner , which he regards as a "father-son story". The film rights to the novel were acquired by the film studio Columbia Pictures in 2007 .
action
A little girl named Mariam lives in the poor outskirts of Herat with her embittered and disaffected mother Nana. Every Thursday she receives a visit from her father Jalil, whose illegitimate daughter she is. Jalil is a wealthy businessman who lives in Herat with his three wives and nine children. There he owns a big house and a cinema. Mariam grew out of an affair with Mariam's mother, whom Jalil entertained while Mariam was employed by him as a housekeeper. To cover up the shame of a bastard, Jalil built a small hut outside the city, in which he housed Mariam and Nana and provided poor financial support.
For her fifteenth birthday, Jalil promises his daughter a visit to his cinema to see Pinocchio . A movie he told her about. When he does not appear, Mariam runs to his house, to which she is refused entry. She experiences an impressive moment when her father is standing at the window and watching her while he is denied by the porter. Then she sleeps on the street outside the front door. When she returns home the next day, Mariam discovers that her mother committed suicide for fear that her daughter would have left her. After her mother dies, Mariam is brought to Jalil's house. His wives urge him to see that Mariam leaves the house quickly. So, despite her resistance, she is married to the shoemaker Rashid, who is thirty years her senior, and moves with him to the distant Kabul . In Kabul, Rashid is initially friendly to her and waits for her to adapt. However, when Mariam suffers multiple miscarriages, he becomes increasingly moody and abusive towards her for appearing unable to bear him a son. One day Mairiam's father turns up in Kabul. He stands in front of her house with his car and calls to be let in. Mariam stays in the house and does not open it to him.
Meanwhile, in the neighboring house in Kabul, a young girl named Laila is growing up with her parents. From an early age, Laila had an intimate friendship with Tariq, a boy her age. As they get older, a secret romance develops. When Afghanistan enters the war and Kabul is suffering from increasingly heavy rocket attacks, Tariq's family makes the decision to leave the city. The emotional farewell to Tariq and Leila culminates in the fact that they love each other for the first time. While Laila's family prepare their own departure, a rocket destroys their home and kills their parents. Laila is seriously injured and then taken in by Rashid and Mariam.
While Laila is still recovering from her injuries, Rashid shows interest in her and woos her. When a traveler testifies to Laile that Tariq and his family died while trying to escape, and she discovers that she is pregnant by Tariq, she quickly agrees to marry Rashid to protect herself and the baby. She gives birth to her daughter Aziza, who is rejected and neglected by Rashid because she is a girl and not the son she was hoping for. At first, Mariam is jealous of Laila and Rashid's attention and interest in her. Their initial coldness towards Laila turns into friendship over time, however, the longer they have to endure Rashid's increasing moodiness and his more frequent abuse together. The friends draw up a plan for Rashid to flee and leave Kabul. The escape fails and they are caught. Rashid punishes them both with beatings, locks them up separately and withholds water from them until Aziza almost dies from it.
Afghanistan, which experiences upheavals in the course of the plot, is experiencing a new change. The Taliban come to power and impose strict rules on the Afghan people, which severely restrict women's rights. Laila, who is again pregnant, gives birth to her second child, her son Zalmai, in an underserved hospital via cesarean section and without anesthesia. Laila and Mariam fight with Rashid, who strongly favors Zalmai, to raise him. In addition to the difficulties of life from Taliban rule, the country is hit by a severe drought. When Rashid's workshop burns down, he is forced to find other work. The whole family suffers from increasing poverty. Eventually Rashid deported Aziza to an orphanage so that she no longer had to look after her. The restricted women's rights forbid women to walk the streets alone, which is why Laila is often beaten when she wants to visit her daughter there. Rashid refuses to take the long walk for her sake.
One day, Tariq, who was believed to be dead, suddenly appears in front of the house. Laila realizes that Rashid hired a man to tell her the fictional story of Tariq's death. It was a ruse to get Laila to marry Rashid. When Rashid comes home from work, he learns from Zalmai about the visitor and immediately identifies him as Tariq due to his limp. Rashid, who has long suspected Tariq as Aziza's father and former lover of Laila, brutally beats Laila. The conflict escalates and he tries to strangle her. Mariam intervenes and kills Rashid with the blow of a shovel. She then helps Laila and Tariq escape. To protect them and to give them a chance for a future, she confesses her murder to Rashid. She is being publicly executed. Laila flees with Tariq and her children to the small town of Muree, Pakistan, where Tariq has an apartment and work.
When Taliban rule ends some time later, Laila and Tariq return to Afghanistan. Laila travels to Herat on behalf of Mariam and looks for Jalil, her father. He has already passed away but left a package for her. Inside is a videotape of Pinocchio, the film he had promised her to watch with her on her fifteenth birthday. Next to it there is a small bag of money and a letter for her. Laila reads the letter in which Jalil writes that he regretted all his life having sent Mariam away and wished he had fought for her then. Laila and Tariq return to Kabul. They use Jalil's money to renovate the orphanage where Aziza once lived. From now on Laila works in the orphanage as a teacher. She gets pregnant again and swears if it becomes a girl she will call her Mariam.
reception
“Even if the stories that Hosseini tells do not belong to world literature, they are read all over the world. And there are good reasons for that: This author is never bored, he always tells colorful, exciting and credible stories. He relies on drastic realism, not cheap bang effects. He also shows the inner contradictions and human weaknesses of his heroines and irresistibly draws his readership into a strange microcosm. To a stranger that Hosseini skillfully draws close. As a narrator, Hosseini brings the fate of his countrymen closer to the world than anyone before. "
“Khaled Hosseini tells in simple, straight words what does not save him from the occasional slip-up, to the left and right of the sometimes bumpy terrain the kitsch is always waiting for him; In spite of all the subtly avoided subtlety, he manages to create characters, situations and moods that have the charm of the known and the expected and yet, or perhaps because of that, are remembered. But because of the stylistic simplicity that is part of the secret of its success, the book remains, for better and for worse, a soap opera for politically enlightened readers. "
literature
Khaleed Hosseini: A thousand radiant suns. Translated from the English by Michael Windgassen. Frankfurt 2007, S. Fischer Verlag , ISBN 978-3-596-03093-4
Web links
- Homepage of Khaleed Hosseini
- Interview with the author (2007) (Die Zeit)
- Review notes in perlentaucher.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Annette Bruhns: Kabul night flowers. In: Der Spiegel. September 25, 2007, accessed February 26, 2020 .
- ↑ Georg Diez: Morals for Millions. In: The time. September 20, 2007, accessed February 26, 2020 .