Who Is Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns?

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Khaled Hosseini, author of A Thousand Splendid Suns, is indisputably a master narrator. His refreshingly distinctive style is rampant throughout the work, as he integrates diverse character perspectives as well as verb tenses to form a temperament of storytelling that is quite inimitably his own. In his novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, he explores the intertwining lives of two drastically different Afghani women, Lailia and Mariam, who come together in a surprising twist of fate during the Soviet takeover and Taliban rule. After returning to his native Afghanistan to observe the nation’s current state amidst decades of mayhem, Hosseini wrote the novel with a specific fiery emotion to communicate a chilling, yet historically accurate account …show more content…

Both Laila, the lucky girl with breathtaking beauty, whose luck suddenly vanishes, and Mariam, the unlucky and illegitimate daughter, whose luck goes from bad to terribly worse, become dynamic and complex characters. This transformation is brought about by the gradual revealing of Hosseini’s motivation. In fact, Hoesseini is evidently motivated to reveal the truth, and let the emotional and physical realities of Afghani women’s lives be known to the …show more content…

He is able to capture the realness of the time and setting through his words, and write for a purpose. As a result, it can be said that he uses this work of historical fiction less as a theatrical stage and more as a platform to introduce the audience to the inhumaneness of Afghanistan. He not only incorporates the Taliban’s grueling “beard lookout men,” who patrol the roads in their fancy Toyota trucks in hopes of finding “a smooth-shaven face to bloody,” but he also displays the horrific and bloodcurdling abuse of women that exists at the hands’ of men and the feelings of great despair and pain that these women face as a result. Living in a state of unbearable fear of the next beating, the next detonating bomb, and the next brutal attempt of the Taliban, the lives of these characters feel almost too real to not be true. Resultantly, the reader is left to wonder whether or not this added literary dimension of realness is actually an introspective study of individuals that Hosseini has long

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