Book review: A story of sibling love, transitioning Afghanistan in ‘And The Mountains Echoed’

Khaled Hosseini’s previous novels “The Kite Runner” (2003) and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (2009) enjoyed weeks on the bestseller list. Both pieces were praised for its gripping drama and Hosseini’s expertise at interweaving his characters’ lives. Though readers can still enjoy the author’s signature literary style in his third release “And The Mountains Echoed,” fans are in for a refreshing surprise.

The novel starts with an Afghan bedtime folklore told by Saboor to his daughter Pari, 3, and son Abdullah, 10. An ogre like creature called a div visits a poverty-stricken town and picks a shanty of a home to knock on the roof of. The chosen household then needs to offer one of their children up to the div lest the monster eat every single one of the family’s children. After a sleepless night, the heartbroken father ushers his youngest outside the door and waits for the div to confiscate his favorite child. The creature then carries the little one off to its home in the mountains.

After a life of grief and regret, the father decides to trek the harsh desert and journey to the div’s palace. The div shows the man into a room with a view of a lush garden brimming with children’s laughter. He soon recognizes his son running in the field. The father demands that he leave with his child in tow, the div considers but offers the father a deal: return to his impoverished town with his son and live a life of desolation or leave his son to stay in the div’s palace where he’ll be educated and fed a bounty. Overnight, the father makes the most difficult decision of his life. The next morning, he walks out of the palace alone.

This fairytale told to Pari and Abdullah sets the tone for the entire novel. Recurring themes in the book stem from this heartbreaking bedtime story where survival, sacrifice and enduring love shine bright against the knotted background of the characters.

The story of Pari and Abdullah, the brother and sister separated at childhood by their father’s decision to give Pari a better life by sending her off to live with his brother-in-law’s rich employers, leaves an immediate hole in the reader’s heart. But this preliminary story seems to be a mere gateway to more heartache as the reader goes through a slew of similar, reinforcing mini-episodes from supporting characters.

Hosseini uses his rich characters as the medium to describe old Afghanistan. From Uncle Nabi, the lovelorn chauffer of renowned poet and liberal Afghan woman Nila Wahdati (the adoptive mother of little Pari) and the introverted and eccentric man of the house, Mr. Suleiman.

Pari eventually grows up in the rich Wahdati household and is able to enjoy the fruits of what money can buy. She later moves away with her conceited mother to Paris after Nila realizes that her outspoken attitude and bohemian lifestyle are too much for steely Afghanistan. Her bedridden husband Suleiman cannot stop her from moving away, leaving Uncle Nabi, chauffer and friend to Suleiman, to care for him until his death.

In this bubble of four characters, Hosseini is able to touch on strong cultural themes: the place of modern women during the transitioning 70s, as well as homosexuality in strict, religious Afghanistan. These brave points break the chains of old-fashioned Afghanistan, where the culture has been known to condemn such behavior.

In later chapters, we see Abdullah aging in California and experiencing the developed stages of dementia. By his side is daughter Pari, obviously named after Abdullah’s beloved sister. Young Pari struggles with the contriving traditional Afghan upbringing of her parents while living in modern America.

Older Pari meanwhile, has enjoyed complete French inculcation. Despite her blissful life and loving family, she feels “the absence of something, or someone, fundamental to her own existence,” which is Hosseini’s way of circling back to Abdullah. Pari later decides to find her roots and meets Young Pari in effect. The meeting of both Pari’s become the well-orchestrated summit of two westernized Afghan women and the comparison of their jarring lives growing up.

Hosseini’s habit for spanning generations in his novels goes hand in hand with his graceful back-and-forth between past and present. The process creates a sophisticated echo chamber of character narratives where he educates the reader on how the past very well affects the future. He successfully creates mirroring mini stories of Pari and Abdullah. To some extent, it succeeded in driving home the point of enduring sibling love, while other stories within the novel appeared to merely pepper the topic.

The account of immigrant Afghan-American cousins Idris and Timur, who come back to a socially and politically healing Afghanistan, was left a bit too raw for this reader to sink her teeth into. Meanwhile the story of Dr. Markos—a plastic surgeon who arrives in Afghanistan to do charity work—was overly written, with no connecting or supporting attribute to the central plot of the book, something not typical of Hosseini. His knack for soap-operatic melodrama seems to be the only driving force behind these two seemingly distant short stories, a mere added drama.

What’s refreshing is Hosseini’s experimentation with different storytelling styles. He recounts Nila Wahdati’s life in the form of a Q&A by a reporter while Uncle Nabi’s flashback is served via long letter to Dr. Markos. These new literary forms within the novel give a refreshing break to the otherwise blocky, prose-like essaying of Hosseini, something he mastered in both his previous novels.

While the aforementioned previous novels' dramas were exhausted to morally testing levels, “And The Mountains Echoed” is their more refined and elegant relative. Hosseini is still the same excellent storyteller, gifted with giving his readers a front row seat at the intimate lives of his strong Afghan characters—only this time; he gives them more forgiving storylines. — VC, GMA News