How to Read "A Thousand Splendid Suns" like a professor

   A Thousand Splendid Suns offers the reader many opportunities to put to work the reading techniques explained by Thomas Foster in "How To Read Literature Like a Professor."

What follows are some simple notes for myself to act as reminders when we get to discussing this book in the first or second week of class.

ch 9 "It''s More than Just Rain" also applies to bodies of water such as streams.  Mariam eagerly awaits her father to lead her across the stream that separates her mother's exiled house from her father.  Eventually, she crosses this stream on her own to seek out her father and his family.  At the very end of the book, Laila goes to find Mariam's old house and the stream is now dried up and and the land is barren  The stream works like a boundary between Mariam and the rest of the world.  As water, it can serve as a kind of cleanser or baptismal experience; without any water there, you have only spirit.  Mariam also fishes with Jalil at the beginning.  The fishing, along with her name, attach her to a number of the Christian stories.  Later, she offeres fish to Laila to eat as a kind of reconcilation as the initially become friends.  Mariam alludes the fact that she used to fish while growing up.

ch 10 "Never Stand Next to the Hero"  You might be the fool whose foolish behavior points out how smart, witty and engaging the heroine is, as in "Persuasion"'s Anne, or you might get hit by a rocket like Laila's parents or take a shovel to the head because you've beating on your wives too much as Rasheed did.  Mariam, may Allah forgive her, is always next to the heroine, Laila (they're kind of co-narrators and co-heroines in Hossein's work), and she ends up being executed for saving her hamshira (my favorite Afghan dialect word of the book).

ch 5 "It's From Shakespeare"

ch. 6 "Or The Bible"

ch 7 "Hanseldee etc"

ch 8 "It's Greek to Me"

All apply in "A Thousand Splendid Suns".  The fables and myths may often come from Middle or Central Asian sources.  The Bible references are outnumbered by Koranic allusions and surahs, but there are many examples for historical and literary points being made from our own Western culture.

I've already mentioned the water and the fishes.  The poem towards the end references the Noah story,  There's an entire section of Kabul dedicated to celebrating The Titanic in a feast of irony as it's located in a dried up river bed with running seqage--way to twist that irony Khaled.

Tajik and Laila are origianlly described as a Romeo and Juliet couple.  How nice that their lives did not end in a double-suicide!

On our first our second class, we'll pick out a few more Greek/ Roman and Hebrew stories buriede in the pages.

ch. 19 My biggest area of ignorance lies with Afghan geogroaphy, which played a huge role in the book, just as Foster's ch 19 said it would.  We'll look into that right away.

ch 23.  It's never Just heart Disease is a long running symbolic jack pot in this story what with Tariq having the prosthetic limb.  I'd argue that the burqua that the women have to wear is worth considering as a symptom of a societal disease; about which we can talk at greater length in our first discussions.