And the Mountains Echoed Reviewed
I recently finished Khaled Hosseini’s third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, and I stated on one of my tweets that I liked it the better than his first two novels. I reconsidered this statement, and although I’m not retracting what I said, it’s hard to say whether or not it’s the best of the three because the story is so different from The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. What I can say, though, is that it is definitely his most ambitious novel yet, grander in scope because of its lengthy timeline and extensive dramatis personae. Here I intend to review the book free of spoilers.
I first read The Kite Runner before it became internationally celebrated, and the only reason I picked it up is because I saw that it was about Afghanistan, and I had just completed my manuscript of Preemptive. I won’t shy away from using realistic fiction as a source for research, especially a novel from an actual Afghan who writes as well as Hosseini does. I loved the book, as did the rest of the world, and I was pleased to see that it didn’t openly contradict anything I’d written in my story. At least, I’m fairly certain it didn’t. Hosseini’s candor about human nature in the story is what grabbed me; it wasn’t merely a book about surviving through a country’s decline and eventual decadence. The universal themes dealing with human nature are prevalent, and plain as day.
A Thousand Splendid Suns, unlike The Kite Runner, kept the reader in Afghanistan for the entirety of the novel. And unlike The Kite Runner, where the protagonist and his father escape Afghanistan as refugees soon after the Soviet Invasion, the two female heroines in A Thousand Splendid Suns must carve out a miserable existence for themselves during the entire Russian occupation and all the political infighting that follows. Hosseini’s portrayal of female persecution in the story is sickening, but it’s this necessary core of the story that appeals to the reader’s sympathies.
And the Mountains Echoed takes an even longer view. It jumps around in time, but goes back as far as 1949 and takes the reader all the way to the present. Although the primary focus of the story is the moving relationship between two siblings, Abdullah and Pari, in a fictional rural village outside of Kabul, the cast of characters is far more expansive than before. Not all of them are Afghans, and Hosseini tells each of their stories in both first and third person narratives, and not consistently in the past tense. Sometimes the stories are told through written letters or magazine article interviews, which adds depth to the story as a whole. Hosseini makes it work. It can be argued whether the reader receives closure at the end of each tale. Some of the shorter stories involving more minor characters left me wanting more, but I suppose this can be seen as a positive. In this book, for better or for worse, life goes on.
Hosseini takes his reader around the world–from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos. In this he creates a type of paradox in the story. Whereas the reader sees how vast cultural differences can often create civil strife among the characters, and sometimes misery, he also breaks the characters down into people, struggling through life, who can all relate to one another through their very basic humanity. Although this is only hinted at in The Kite Runner, it’s brought to the forefront of the story in And the Mountains Echoed.
Everything one would expect from a Khaled Hosseini novel is there: family, honor, sacrifice, poverty, duty, violence, guilt, justice, and intense joy coupled with excruciating pain. Characters fall from grace. Some are redeemed, and some aren’t seeking redemption. They are all significantly flawed in one way or another. And, of course, there’s Hosseini’s ever-prevalent theme of hope. Without it, most of us would have difficulty getting through the heartbreak of the novel.
