Throughout the book I struggled with Hosseini's development of his characters. At times they all ran together and spoke with one "voice" instead of having unique speech, thought or emotional patterns.
Did you feel he did a good job of accurately portraying the emotional lives of teenage girls? Mariam was married at 15, Laila at 14, yet to me they sounded the same throughout the book, even when they were much older women. What did he do to make them seem like the immature teenagers they were?
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I hadn't thought of that. Do you think he was possibly trying to make the point that these women were essentially robbed of their adolescence, that a maturity was forced on them early and that they had no opportunity to "grow"? One minute you're a kid playing and daydreaming, and the next you're some geezer's domestic slave.
Aziza, hard as her life was, was nourished on the love of two moms who were crazy about her, and her youth seemed more richly portrayed. (Laila's own mom was emotionally AWOL most of her life, and Mariam's mom was a bitter outcast).
But as far as making them "look like the immature teenagers they were," I think we saw signs of this in Mariam's youthful delusions about her father and the future, but we saw it more in Laila, who had more freedom to be young — in her romantic daydreams about Tariq (remember the scene where her dad is trying to teach her something and she is just mentally lusting after Tariq? Hehe).
I did notice that the women sounded largely the same throughout the book. I kept forgetting how old they were at various times and had to go back and check the time references. For instance, Laila was 14 when she married Rasheed, but she seemed much older than that to me. But your examples are good, kc, to show the girls' youthfulness before their lives took terrible turns. Perhaps the thought is that traumatic events make people grow up quickly.
Good points, kc. I think my biggest problem came when we first met nine year old Laila. She just didn't think nine year old thoughts. I am occasionally around nine year olds and even mature ones don't think like that.
I think he has no idea how to write a nine year old girl. I guess their ages were representative of their culture but for me, he didn't handle that well.
What did you think of the strategy he used in writing all about Mariam in part one, then telling us the story of Laila in part two before bringing them together? I found myself missing Mariam and wondering what was happening to her across the street while we read of Laila’s life. It seemed a little disjointed to me.
Yeah, I'm not sure what to think of the shifting narrative. It seemed clunky at first and, like you, I missed Mariam, but it seemed to smooth out as the story went on. Would you two have liked the stories to have been more integrated from the beginning?
Do you think there was some notion of the narrative mirroring Mariam's life? For a long stretch it is just about her and what happens to her, and then, boom, someone else, wife #2, is at the forefront, displacing Mariam in her own home, in her own story, but, by and by, the lives/stories become interwoven?
kc, you give him much more credit in thinking these things through than I do. I suppposed he had broken up the story like he did simply for chronological reasons. Much of Mariam's story happened before Laila was ever born.
I wished he had interjected Mariam more into Laila's story. Let us know periodically that she had another miscarriage or tell some story about she and Rasheed instead of the one passing sentence he gave about decades of abuse and 7 miscarriages (or however many, I don't have my book with me).
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