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A Thousand Splendid Suns: A Window Into Another Culture

1253 Words6 Pages

Tricia Lively
A Thousand Splendid Suns; A Window Into Another Culture

After reading The Kite Runner a few years ago, I had very high expectations of Khaled Hosseini’s second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Once I finished the book, I was taken back by the way Hosseini is able to open our eyes to Afghan culture and the lifestyle that is lived. As the reader, you are sucked into the story and become very interested in the characters as well as the situations that they face due to a very different world. There are times when you want to laugh; there are times where you want to cry, and times where you are uncomfortable due to being culturally ignorant. The main themes in A Thousand Splendid Suns include, the place of women and femininity in …show more content…

Always. You remember that, Mariam." And: "It's our lot in life, Mariam. Women like us. We endure. It's all we have." And: "She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world . . . As reminders of how women like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us."
Mariam's life with Rasheed is testimony enough to the legitimacy of Nana's cautions, and it becomes even crueler when he takes a girl, Laila, as his second wife. She is no more passionate about this than as Mariam was, but she has a reason to settle, she is newly pregnant by the young man she loves. Previously to knowing this, he asked her to marry him and she half-heartedly declined, but now she believes he is dead, and she hopes that Rasheed will believe the child is his

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