The Khalid Hosseini Trilogy

 The Khaled Hosseini Trilogy: Novels Inspired by the Sad Recent History of Afghanistan

Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-born American novelist and physician. After graduating from college, he worked as a doctor in California. He has published three novels to date, most notably his 2003 debut The Kite Runner. All of these novels are at least partially set in Afghanistan and feature an Afghan protagonist. Following the success of The Kite Runner, he retired from medicine to write full-time. As I have read these three wonderful novels, I will review them here as a triptych.

1. The Kite Runner

One of the most moving and well-crafted books I have read in recent years is The Kite Runner (Bloomsbury, 2004). The author was born in Afghanistan and his family received political asylum in the USA in 1980. He has a wonderful website at KH.  This novel is a marvellous first work - it is well written, and it captures childhood in Afghanistan very well indeed. This book runs the whole gamut of emotions from joy to sorrow and back again. I wish I could write like Hosseini, but much more I wish I had such a moving story to tell. It is refreshing to read books by Afghans because such a much abused and suffering country needs to have its voice heard. Well done, on this score, Mr Hosseini. 

The blurb captures well the depth and strength of emotions within the covers. The reviewer in the Daily Mail had this to say: “Rings true with tenderness and truth” while The Daily Telegraph’s counterpart praised it as “a devastating, masterful and painfully honest story.” This book kept my interest from start to finish – I read it over 4 or 5 days while visiting Rome one Easter. I chanced to pick the book up in the wonderful “San Francisco Book Shop” in Paris a few days earlier while I stayed there with my friends Mat and his wife Isabelle.

The story is one of both recapturing the innocence of childhood and facing squarely the selfish betrayal by twelve-year-old Amir (of the Pashtun people, mostly Sunni Muslim) of his close friend and loyal servant Hassan (of the Hazara people, mostly Shia Muslim – a small minority tribe). Hosseini does not spare the truth and tells it with sincerity in a simple disarming style. Hosseini’s own site gives a wonderfully simple summary of this novel:

Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds: Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him.KH

The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship, betrayal, and the price of loyalty. It is about the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of the lies they tell to one another. Written against a history that has not been told in fiction before its publication, The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being destroyed. But with the devastation, Khaled Hosseini also gives us hope: through the novel's faith in the power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows for redemption. 

What entranced me above all about this novel is its searing honesty. I liked especially the fact that Amir’s father Baba (Persian for Daddy) was an unbeliever, that he did not tow either the party line or a specific religious line. He was as far away from a “fundamentalist Muslim” as possible. For us here in the West, who are victims of propaganda that paints all Muslims as extremists, reading this novel is refreshing, inspiring and heartening. 

On page 57 we read these typical words of a 12-year-old child longing for his father’s affection: “But all I heard – and I willed myself to hear – was the thudding blood in my head. All I saw was the blue kite. All I smelled was victory. Salvation. Redemption. If Baba was wrong and there was a God like they said at school, then He’d let me win… But this was my one chance to become someone who was looked at, not seen, listened to, not heard…I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.” 

Then, on the next page we cannot help rejoicing in the child’s perceived newly won favour with his cold and distant father: - “Then I was screaming, and everything was colour and sound, everything was alive and good. I was throwing my free arm around Hassan and we were hopping up and down, both of us laughing, both of us weeping. “You won, Amir Agha! You won!”…” (p. 58) Then I saw Baba on the roof. He was standing on the edge, pumping both of his fists. Hollering and clapping. And that right there was the single greatest moment of life, seeing Baba on the roof, proud of me at last.” (p 58) 

    Some pages later we read of the dreadful rape of Hassan by Assef as he bravely and loyally redeemed the blue kite for his friend Amir. All the while Amir was watching this awful spectacle, cowering fearfully and cowardly in hiding nearby without coming to his loyal friend’s aid. This is Amir’s shame and it is a shame which the central character seeks to expiate on his road to redemption. This painful road to redemption is what this novel is essentially about. The words describing this dastardly deed are spare and pointed: “Hassan didn’t struggle. Didn’t even whimper. He moved his head slightly and I caught a glimpse of his face. Saw the resignation in it. It was a look I had seen before. It was the look of the lamb.” (p. 66)

For all readers who wish to recapture a little innocence, the pain of growing up, the tortured mind of a friend who is the betrayer, the first realization that we all are sinners and wrong-doers to a greater or lesser extent, that the friendships of our youth can and do endure despite setbacks and that real courage and loyalty do exist and that finally redemption is possible, then this is the book for you. This is a hopeful book, a wonderful work of deep humanity, full of compassion, and all of it told with an honesty that is at once moving and uplifting. Truly a marvellous read. Ten out of ten!! 

2. A Thousand Splendid Suns

The second book from Hosseini’s pen is an equally moving tour de force as The Kite Runner, namely a novel called A Thousand Splendid Suns  (Bloomsbury 2007).  To my mind, this Afghan author has done a lot to give voice to the voiceless people and victims of the horrific Afghan wars.  I also believe that this writer has done more in these first two novels to present to the world a richer and more liberal face of Islam than any purposeful apologia.  We in the West know little or nothing about the marvellous cultural and religious riches of Islamic culture.  Our view of this Middle Eastern culture has been coloured by the inevitable reports of suicide bombers taking out many lives in the name of Allah.  One hopes that it is writers like Hosseini who will be widely read and that the results of his wonderfully human portrayal of life in places like Afghanistan during the horrific wars of occupation and later wars of internecine struggle will allow people in the West to have some appreciation for the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East.  Islam does have a human face.  Bin Laden or Isis are not the only images available.

From the moment I took up A Thousand Splendid Suns I could not leave it down, carrying it with me over a week or so so that I could read it at any given opportunity.  I found myself reading it in the car before or after a walk and also before and after an interview I had.  As I say, this book is an emotional tour de force which engages the reader across the whole gamut of emotions.  One is captivated by sadness and pity at one instance, by disbelief and anger at another, by sheer horror and almost physical sickness at another and occasionally by the peace and tranquillity of a profound nature that allows no superficial or saccharine acceptance.  Peace and tranquillity in the bitter soil of Afghanistan are hard-fought-for realities and not ones that simply can be taken for granted.

This book reminds me of Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.  In that book, Doyle put himself into Paula's head and presented to us, the reading public, what it was like to be a victim of a husband who physically abused her.  Hosseini is doing the same here and he puts himself into the characters of two women protagonists - who outshine all the men we meet in this wonderful book - namely Mariam and Laila.  Hosseini, who is a widely read Afghan Doctor living in America, is scathing in his portrayal of the way women are treated under certain kinds of ultra-right-wing or extreme conservative take on Islam.  All through this book Mariam and Laila are punched and kicked like rag dolls by their husband - a husband not of their choosing but whom they have been forced to marry by traditional practices of match-making where literally the young girls are "sold" off to far older bachelors of questionable morals.  As a Western reader, I found myself revolted by the level of wanton aggression towards women, and sometimes children, in this book.  That Hosseini is telling the truth we are never in any doubt.

However, this is a novel, not a documentary.  It is told like a story from the lips of a wonderfully astute and sensitive storyteller who knows the magic of words, and especially the effect created by the right word in the right place.  As a writer myself, I envy his style, the lightness of language that seems to trip off his tongue so inevitably.  Now I know what my erstwhile English teacher, Bartholomew Doyle, M.A. meant when he said all those years ago - "A true writer, boys, is possessed of an inevitability of language."   Indeed, Hosseini has this gift in spades.

Writing is a craft, which, when practised, flows with ease.  This novel starts with what I consider a wonderfully simple, direct and loaded sentence.  That sentence is:  "Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami." (p. 3)  Immediately,  we are in the mind of a five-year-old girl and we are introduced to a word we Westerners are ignorant of, and we read on to get the meaning, and on the following page it is translated as "bastard."  Mariam is a bastard child of a rich landlord, Jalil, who has two or three other official wives. Because of Nana's standing or background, she cannot be married and hence has to be exiled with her daughter to a wooden and clay shack, called a kolba, out in a lonely wooded area.  The occasion of Nana's calling her own daughter a harami was when the poor little five-year-old Mariam dropped and broke the last piece of her mother's china.  This is a wonderful and clever scene because it forebodes much breaking and much evil in Mariam's future life.  A clever and intuitive writer realises all too well what he's doing in this simple instance which will become symbolic of the evil that shoots like a sharp and ruthless scimitar through the novel.

The first chapter ends with these sad and bitter words in the mouth of Nana, Mariam's neglected and ostracized mother:  ‘Nana said, "Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter:  Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman.  Always.  You remember that, Mariam."’  (p. 7)

Mariam did go on to painfully learn this.  She suffers rejection after rejection, first at the hands of her own father, Jalil, who had always been kind to her but always on his own terms (for the sake of respectability only).  Then she has to live through her mother's suicide and her being matched at 15 years of age with a 45-year-old bulldog of a man called Rasheed who beats her often to within inches of her life.  One is left in no doubt but that our author excoriates the ultra-conservative traditions of Islam.  Behind it all shines through the wonderfully understated compassion of a more liberal take on Islam, the take of Laila’s father and mother, namely Babi and Mammy.  Babi, who had gone to Kabul University, had become a teacher.  He is widely read in all the great literature of Afghanistan and other Islamic classics outside the Koran.

Babi knew most of Rumi's and Hafez's ghazals by heart.  He could speak at length about the struggle between Britain and Czarist Russia over Afghanistan.  He knew the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite, and could tell you that the distance between the earth and the sun was the same as going from Kabul to Ghazni one and a half million times. (p. 99) However, this gentle and learned Islam, this open and friendlier Islam, does not get a look in.  In fact, Babi and his wife, together with all their learned books are blown to bits by the rockets of the internecine struggle between different factions of the Mujahidin.

The way Hosseini manages to get into the heads of the two women Mariam and Laila is uncannily good.  We are one with them at all times.  We can feel their discomfort before the brutishness of Rasheed who happens to be the character who connects both.  This gross character looks at a wife as his property who must be hidden behind her burqa (or burqua; also transliterated as burka).  This sleazy old devil gives Mariam her own room and only comes to her when he feels like sex.  He sees her merely as a servant in the house and as a baby-making machine.  Likewise, when he marries Laila, with more than a little dishonesty, he views her in the same manner.  One could argue that he is a little more considerate of Laila as she is far prettier than Mariam. However, they are both mere chattels which Rasheed uses and abuses at whim.  The level of this abuse is revolting, to say the least, and had my stomach churning.  How one would like to kill such a monster as this.  I'm aware that this is a novel, but a traditional system which allows men such power is corrupt to the core, to say the least.

Thankfully, there certainly are kindly people like the old Mullah Faizullah who teaches the young Mariam prayers and wisdom from the Koran. He is gentle, kind and considerate to Mariam. Laila's father is a gentle considerate man also, but such characters are few and far between.

This novel is littered with the wreckage of war: blown-up buildings and equally devastated human beings.  Throughout, one feels that the luxuries of culture are mere layers that can be torn away at whim to reveal nothing but hate and grief and more hate and grief.  The hate between rival factions and nations is palpable in this novel while innocent civilians are murdered and crippled in the crossfire - especially women and children.  It is no wonder Hosseini has dedicated this novel to the long-suffering women of Afghanistan.  Likewise, it is unsurprising that this wonderful writer was named a US goodwill envoy to the United Nations Refugee Agency.  Please hit the following links for Hosseini's website where you will get more information on both the author and his work:- KH 

One gets the provenance of the title of the novel eventually on page 172, viz., poor Babi and Mammy with their daughter Laila are preparing at long last to leave the war-torn capital Kabul and Babi is looking forlornly at all his books which he will have to leave behind.  He tells Laila that one verse of a poem has been going around and around in his mind:

All day this poem about Kabul has been bouncing around in my head.  Saib-e-Tabrizi wrote it back in the seventeenth century, I think.  I used to know the whole poem, but all I can remember now is two lines: "One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, / Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."  (p.172)

The explosion that blows both her parents away and slightly injures Laila happens soon after this in the novel. We are in Laila's mind when this is happening and the description is mind-blowing.  Other wonderful descriptions are the heartless and perfunctory sex between Rasheed and his two wives; the thoughts of the women as they are being systematically brutalised by him and the overall feeling the reader gets of downright pity and sympathy and hopefully love for these poor neglected victims of horrific and unpitying war.  The description of the love scenes between Laila and her long-time friend and ultimate husband Tariq are beautifully natural and sublime in their presentation. 

    I also loved the way Mariam and Laila eventually build up a good relationship - a silent and powerless unity against a brute until eventually.....  I won't spoil the novel by saying what that eventuality is.  Also, the childless Mariam builds a wonderful relationship with Laila's daughter Aziza (by Tariq, not Rasheed). Here I agree thoroughly and completely with Hosseini’s description of love as connection.

The list of forbidden things issued by the decree of the Taliban on page 248 is nothing short of misogyny.  I won't quote them here - I'll leave it to the reader to be disturbed by its sheer lack of all understanding and humanity.  One is left in no doubt that not alone are the Taliban absolute brutes but that they are also anarchists in many senses as they totally undermine culture - including their own.  We have a marvellously tender account of Babi bringing both Laila and Tariq, her eventual husband and long-time friend, to climb the famous Buddhas at Bamiyan (see pages 132 and following) and then later we are presented with the horrible destruction of such irreplaceable heritage at the hands of the same Taliban. (See pages 278 and following).

Mariam's death, which I will not go into here in case I spoil the novel, is told wonderfully.  Once again we are in her mind and can feel what it is like to be facing one's death.  All is beautifully and tenderly described.  How I wish I could write like that.

This is no mawkish novel as any reader will realise even after reading the very first sentence.  It is so full of realism and indeed reality, far too real most of the time for anyone with a sensitive stomach.  I remember T.S. Eliot saying that "humankind cannot stand too much reality."  After reading this I realise that humankind has stood much reality and more than the closeted Mr Eliot, like any of us equally closeted Westerners, ever possibly did or will.  I learned the same from the writings of Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel.

It is a touching and healing moment for Laila, the writer and indeed the reader when she goes to visit the old house or kolba where her dead friend Mariam once lived as a child.  It is a very touching scene.  I must admit the tears began to roll down my cheeks.  I always know a good novel when this happens to me.  Something gives within me; some powerful energy released; a wonderful katharsis; a deep longing to be doing something to heal the brokenness of our sad world.

Sometimes beautiful Laila gets lost in her thoughts and is spirited away by the power of a wisdom that can only be bought in the wake of suffering, that her little daughter gets worried and asks, "Are you all right, mammy?"  I can hear the child's words in my own mind.  I'd ask the same question myself.  My eyes begin to cloud over with tears.  The ending is realistic, at once simple and profound. Tariq's and Laila's children are playing an alphabet game trying to come up with a name for the new baby which is on its way, and the end sentence is to die for.  I began by quoting the very first sentence.  I will finish here by quoting the last to round off this review of the novel: “But the game involves only male names.  Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her.” (p. 367)

3. And The Mountains Echoed

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 Afghan 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.” (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. (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 Afghan 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.

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 simply do not really want to know anything much about his past life.  So a better editing of the text could have added to its power as a piece of literature.  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, especially when 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. (pp. 23-24)

I do hope I have whetted your appetite to make you want to read more of Khaled Hosseini and that other novels are soon forthcoming from his inspired pen.  The famous French scholar Bouffon was surely right when he wrote “le style, c’est l’homme meme!” Style and substance, after all, are seamlessly interwoven in anything we humans create or do.  You will, assuredly, get both of these qualities in these heart-wrenching reads.  Enjoy!