This boiled-down version of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini documents both the events of the novel as well as my personal experience with another novel of Hosseini's, The Kite Runner. I read this book in high school and was utterly traumatized by it, despite glowing reviews worldwide. I made the decision (after finishing the book and quite literally throwing it across the room--a violence against a book I had never dreamed of) to never read another novel by this author. I encapsulated that experience and filed it up high on a mental shelf so it would not intermingle with other memories. Looking back at this point in my life, it seems likely that I overreacted to the content of that first novel I read, but thought I would try to replicate the way I dealt with it in this project.
In this modified version of A Thousand Splendid Suns, each page has been trimmed down into a ragged-edged circle, then dyed with various inks en masse. A rough gradient was produced from this technique. At this point, the novel was restacked by color, based on the events occurring in the story. The five yellow disks hold very little presence as there are so few bright moments in the story line, however black and red abound as trauma and death are plentiful.
The original hard cover was extracted and affixed to the lid of the newly-formatted "book"
This encapsulation of the novel was a valuable exercise in conveying an experience from my past into a "readable" form for viewers outside of myself. By transforming it into a visual representation of how I imagine containing the experience within my brain, I feel like I can let go of some of the trauma associated with it.
