Review of Khaled Hosseini's And The Mountains Echoed

The Power of Story

My Copy that I have just finished reading

Khaled Hosseini is a gifted storyteller. He draws us into his web of wonder and sorrow, happiness and pain with the ease of a spider catching its prey.  Suspension of disbelief is never in question as the web he weaves is, alas, all too real and all too true, for the real life sufferings of the Afghani people in the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the next form the backdrop of his new novel And The Mountains Echoed (2013) as it does for his previous two A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) and The Kite Runner (2003).

Hosseini is a most powerful writer, all the more extraordinary as English is his second tongue after Farsi.  He writes wonderful descriptions of places, things, customs and people in oftentimes the simplest of words. He is a master of his craft as we see in such descriptions of intuitive feelings as: “...Baba Ayub didn’t understand. Just as he didn’t understand why a wave of something, something like the tail end of a sad dream, always swept through him whenever he heard the jingling, surprising him each time like an unexpected gust of wind.  But then it passed, as all things do.  It passed.” (Op. cit., p.15)

Or again, take this description of the death of Parwana’s first child as an illustration of how well and how effective a crafter of words Hosseini is:

He was two weeks old. Parwana and father had barely named him.  He was one of three babies that cruel winter had taken in Shadbagh.  Abdullah remembered Parwana clutching Omar’s swaddled little corpse, her fits of grief. He remembered the day they buried him up on the hill, a tiny mound on frozen ground, beneath a pewter sky, Mullah Shekib saying the prayers, the wind spraying grits of snow and ice into everyone’s eyes. (Ibid., p. 21)

One could go on giving examples of Hosseini’s wonderful prose, which at times has the feel and depth of good poetry, but such would be obviously excessive and belabour the point at issue.

Essentially this book is about “the ties that bind” any closely knit family together.  Once again Afghanistan and the Afghani people form the backdrop for this novel.  The tragedy of both are seamlessly interwoven with the plight of Abdullah and his sister Pari from the year 1952 right up until the year of publication of the novel, 2013.  The novel traces their close relationship, their separation for decades and their eventual reunification many years later.  The story traces the journey of their individual lives deftly and sympathetically though never sparing us the more tragic occurrences along the way. In sum, the novel is about the ties that bind or the bonds that shape our lives, and how our individual existential choices define our identities.

The Italian version of this Book

One criticism this reader would level at And the Mountains Echoed would be that the whole chapter, namely chapter eight, on the background of the Greek plastic surgeon Markos is totally irrelevant to the overall development of the novel.  As I was reading it, it felt like I was reading a chapter from another novel.  Markos, of course, plays an important role in the novel, but only in so far as he is the conduit through whom the old man Uncle Nabi manages to get in contact with his relatives who have emigrated abroad from Kabul. We simple do not really want to know anything much about his past life.

Given that small reservation, this is a wonderful novel on the human condition, and it runs the whole gamut of emotions and tugs at every string in the reader’s heart, bar none.  I was moved throughout this whole novel, especially where the little boy Abdullah muses on the death of his mother, and the contrasting ways fathers and mothers love: 

Her hair reminded Abdullah of his mother’s, and he ached for her all over again, for her gentleness, her inborn happiness, her bewilderment at people’s cruelty.  He remembered her hiccupping laughter, and the timid way she sometimes tilted her head.  His mother had been delicate, both in stature and nature, a wispy, slim-waisted woman with a puff of hair always spilling from under her scarf.  He used to wonder how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness.  It couldn’t. It spilled out of her, came pouring out her eyes.  Father was different.  Father had hardness in him.  His eyes looked out on the same world as Mother’s had and saw only indifference.  Endless toil.  Father’s world was unsparing.  Nothing good came free.  Even love.  You paid for all things, and if you were poor, suffering was your currency. (Ibid., pp. 23-24)

I do hope I have whetted your appetite to make you want to read more of this tour de force of a novel from the authorship of a master writer.  The famous French scholar Bouffon was surely right when he wrote “le style, c’est l’homme meme!” for style and substance are indeed seamlessly interwoven in anything we humans create or do.  You will, assuredly, get both in this heart-wrenching read.  Enjoy!