In the span of two years I’ve written for TEMPO, I have come to read many novels—some enlightening, some not so much. Khaled Hosseini’s latest, “And the Mountains Echoed” is, without doubt, one of the best.
With a prose that moves the reader’s soul, and with imagery that imprints itself into the mind, “And the Mountains Echoed”revisits Hosseini’s most beloved tropes of pre-war Afghanistan, exile and the reunion of separated siblings.
The beloved author of “The Kite Runner” (2003) and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (2009), Hosseini grabs the reader from the very first sentence – a gift preserved to the master storytellers of our time. “You want a story and I will tell you one”, he starts, and from those first words Hosseini launches into an intricate tale about Abdullah, 10, and his sister Pari, 3 – two children born to an impoverished family in the Afghan village of Shadbagh.
On a fateful day in Kabul, the brother and sister are forced to part. We are invited to experience Abdullah’s pain, as the pieces, little by little, are woven together through time…starting from Kabul to Paris and ending in the Greek island of Tinos.
In “And the Mountains Echoed,” Hosseini works on creating a set of characters of many complexities. The novel resonates with the brilliance of past works, as we see Hosseini sticking to the themes he is exceptional in… from a family forced to separate, to a memory of a forgotten glorious Afghanistan, which sang the tunes of freedom, modernity and history. In the same vein, Hosseini brings to life the very political context of Afghanistan post 9/11 and gives us insight on the way the country is perceived by the world.
Propelling us through a journey of emotional turmoil, betrayal, nostalgia and yearning, Hosseini drives the reader from the crowded streets and bazaars of 1952 Kabul to Taliban-infested Waziristan in 2003, across Europe to France and Greece, and then beyond to California, in the United States. Through it all the reader is plunged into vivid imagery that transports him or her to places he or she may have never seen before.
The yearning for reunion pulls at the reader till the very end of the book, where in one final master stroke we take a step back to survey the intimate interconnectedness and reasoning behind all the decisions made in the name of family, survival, loyalty, and more.
By Azza El Masri
