"People can't count how many bright moons there are on her roof, or how many thousand brilliant suns are behind her walls."
Mirza Muhammad Ali Saiyb.
Following the global release of the debut work "The Kite Runner" and the high sales, Khaled Hosseini's masterpiece "A Thousand Splendid Suns" once again ushered in both word-of-mouth and sales with a good momentum.
The author writes about the fate of two women under the Afghan refugee crisis from a female perspective, they have endured hardships and political oppression, they have encouraged each other, and finally bravely resisted and ushered in redemption.
The fates of two women are intertwined
In "A Thousand Splendid Suns", Mariam is an unrecognized "harami" (illegitimate child), and she once lived in the fantasy of a good world with her father as a young child.
Her father's big house is separated from her and her mother's home by a long river, and she dreams of living with him in her father's big house, Nana often tells her that she can't get close to her father as a "harami", and Mariam is convinced of her deep affection for his father.
One day, she finally bravely found her father's home, but was turned away by the driver of her father's house for various reasons such as her father's absence.
She slept outside the door all night, and before leaving, she looked up and saw her father looking out by the curtain, and at that moment she realized that his father's love for her was hypocritical.
Nana had said that Mariam would kill herself if she went to her father, and when Mariam returned home, she saw that Nana had fulfilled her promise.
After losing her mother, Mariam was taken to live in her father's mansion. However, Harami's status made her life uncomfortable, and it wasn't long before her stepmother and father asked her to marry a shoemaker whose home was four or five hundred kilometers away.
With no way out, Mariam knew her humble fate and reluctantly accepted this condition.
That year, Mariam was fourteen years old, and the shoemaker was already in his forties.
The other heroine, Leila, lives in a family with a strong mother and a humble father, and only being with the neighbor's one-legged boy, Tariq, can make her feel comfortable.
The death of her two older brothers makes her mother's preference for sons even more apparent, and the young Leila suffers from the grief and injustice of her mother who has lost her child.
Leila and Tariq are close to each other, and the two steal the forbidden fruit before the war, but a war separates the two and the artillery attack also causes Leila to lose both parents.
The neighbor shoemaker rescued her from the fire, and when she heard that Tariq had already died on the battlefield, Leila, who had lost her parents, lost faith in life, and the shoemaker promised to marry her, and Leila, who realized that she was pregnant, had to bow to life and nod her head in agreement.
And the shoemaker's wife was none other than Mariam.
In this way, the destinies of the two women are connected.
Female friendships that bloom in the midst of suffering
At first, Mariam resented that Leila had stolen her husband's favor, even though he treated her like an ant after she failed to give birth to a child several times, often kicking and punching her.
When Leila became pregnant and gave birth to a child, her life became even more difficult, and her husband's very different attitudes towards the two made it difficult for Mariam to balance.
Once Mariam is about to be brutally abused by her husband again, Leila comes forward to rescue her, and Leila's child melts Mariam's heart, and the friendship between the two is opened.
They drank tea together;Do housework together;Plan together to escape from a dangerous home. They found in each other the light that illuminates the hope of moving forward, maybe this is the ** of this book "A Thousand Splendid Suns", they** each other, illuminating the hope of each other's lives.
In times of crisis, there are always people to sacrifice. Mariam chooses to take sole responsibility after killing her husband Rashid, and her feminine glow elevates the whole book to a new level.
The shoemaker Rashid's humanity is ugly
Their husband, Rashid, is the biggest villain in the book, who is ugly, hypocritical and cunning, and whose extreme machismo and violence lead him to his demise.
In him we can see the ugliest thing about human nature, he is the creator of the suffering of Mariam and Leila in the second half of their lives, and he is also the representative of masculinity in the background era of the book.
When he wants something out of Mariam or Leila, he immediately becomes gentle and deceptive.
When Mariam and Leila are unable to satisfy his heart's desires, he becomes hateful and violent again.
Nana once said to Mariam, "Now I will teach you a word, and you should remember it."My daughter: Just as the compass always points north, the finger of men's blame always points to women. You have to remember that, Mariam. ”
Young Mariam didn't know what it meant until her body and mind were trampled and tormented by Rashid.
When an incompetent man's desires are aroused and not satisfied, he is Xi to lose his temper with those around him and transfer all the fault to others.
Despite living in one house, two different hearts beat. The contrast between the distorted humanity of men and the gentle humanity of women is ironic in the book.
Morality in the context of war
In A Thousand Splendid Suns, we can see that traditional beliefs are deeply rooted in the Afghan refugee crisis, and there is a clear imbalance and gap in the status of men and women.
For a long time, women were kept from going out;You must be accompanied by a man when you go out;You must mask your face when you go out, etc., and the description of women's ordeal in the book is very profound.
The status of women there was quite low, and the contrast between Rashid's attitude towards her son and daughter, and Leila's mother's contrast to her brother and her, is evident in the strong patriarchal values of the time.
BitterDifficulties and hopes are intertwined and ushered in the dawn
In a battle against fate, Mariam and Leila finally come to the rescue.
Although Mariam was eventually killed in prison, she felt saved, and she would still choose to kill Rashid one more time.
Mariam could have chosen to side with Rashid against Leila, but the goodness of humanity prevented her from doing so.
She was rescued, and the presence of Leila and Leila's daughter poured out her already withered heart, and in the time she spent with them, she felt a thousand rays of sunshine shining on her heart, and the brilliant thousand suns in her heart had already been ignited.
Saved by Mariam and Tariq, Leila was eventually freed and returned to Mariam's hometown, where she rebuilt the nursing home to save more children.
Suffering can temper people's will, and the goodness of human nature brings them together, allowing them to fight against evil and return to freedom.
During those years, Mariam brought Leila a light that illuminated every step of her future.
The feminine power that exists in the midst of suffering reminds us that we should always have good thoughts in our hearts, and that after a strong and courageous struggle, there will be a light at the end of the day!