Hosseini’s Second Afghan Novel is, Like Its Title, Splendid

Just one CD into the audio version of Khaled Hosseini’s new book, “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” I began to wonder: When will there be brutality?

If this was anything like Hosseini’s first novel, a best seller for months, I wouldn’t have long to wait. Sure enough, before the second CD was finished …

This was, after all, Afghanistan, and if Hosseini’s novels are accurate portrayals, life for its citizens is a perilous journey.

This novel in particular seems to inhabit a kind of intersection between the violence of a war-torn society and the cruelty of individuals _ a father who betrays his daughter, an abusive husband whose wife’s only crime is that she has miscarried, a stranger who steals bus fare from women in need of help.

And just when you think it can’t get any worse, a family loses all its money and begins to starve.

But the novel stretches far in other directions, too. A girl injured in a mortar attack finds happiness. Two women who are enemies find common ground, then a sustaining and enduring love.

Listening to the Simon & Schuster narration (12 hours unabridged; $39.95) by actress Atossa Leoni is both riveting and transporting. (It’s available abridged, too, but why would anyone forgo the pleasure of the whole thing?)

Indeed, “A Thousand Splendid Suns” is about as perfect as an audio book can get.

There are so many reasons. One is the sheer magnificence of the tale.

An illegitimate girl sent with her mother to live in a rural hovel nevertheless grows to love her father during his weekly visits. But when she presses for more from him _ why can’t she go to the movies with his other children, her half-siblings? _ he denies her and hides from her. Her mother dies, and he marries off the 15-year-old girl to a 40-year-old shoemaker in faraway Kabul.

Meanwhile, just down the street in Kabul, another girl is growing up happy, loved and educated. But when her parents are killed in a mortar attack, she is forced to accept the shoemaker’s proposal to become his second wife.

This isn’t even the half of it. After the Russian occupation come the repression and retributions of the Taliban. The scenes are vivid, compelling and searing.

And then Leoni steps in, adding her accent _ she’s of Iranian and Afghan descent _ and almost musical pronunciations of Afghan names and Afghan words.

The illegitimate girl, Mariam, is Mah-di-AHM.

The girl down the street, Laila, is Lie-LUH, although sometimes Leoni subtly shifts the accent to LIE-luh.

A boy is Tariq: Tah-DEEK.

The country itself isn’t the twangy place most Americans make it _ Af-GAAN-ih-staan _ but a lilting Af-WAHN-ih-stohn.

The whole thing is beautiful and horrible, maybe like watching a car dive over the lip of the Grand Canyon.

When Laila takes a cab one day, she sees a photo of a small child and asks the driver about it. What follows is, of course, a tragic story.

“I’m sorry,” Laila says. And then she begins “marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief.”

But the beauty of Hosseini is that there is always hope.

“And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on. Laila thinks of her own life and all that has happened to her, and she is astonished that she, too, has survived. That she is alive and sitting in this taxi, listening to this man’s story.”

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Sandy Bauers: sbauers@phillynews.com

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(c) 2007, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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