And the
Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hossein; New York: Riverhead Books,
2012. 404 pp. $28.95
You have probably read The Kite Runner. Maybe you read A Thousand
Splendid Suns. Like me, maybe you found these two novels several notches
above just good reads. In my opinion, and that of my friends, Khaled
Hosseini’s third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, surpasses both of
his previous books. The book is a series of inter-related stories that
delve deeply into the pain of loss and betrayal, the evil of greed and
ruthless ambition, and the uncomfortable terrain of ethical and moral
ambiguity. We read also of the tender love of brother and sister, the means
by which desperate youth survive or choose not to survive, and other
experiences of life in the midst of internal and external conflict.
Each
of the nine chapters is connected with the other chapters through the
appearance of, or reference to, characters from the other stories. The
doctor who appears at the door of the Whadati house in Kabul becomes the
central figure in a later chapter. Saboor, a primary character in the
first chapter, is merely mentioned as an ancestor of a character in another
chapter. Abdullah and Pari, however, are present in each story by their
absence. Whether in Kabul or San Francisco, whether in 1949, 1952, 1974, or
2010, the reader holds in suspense their unfinished story.
Hosseini brings the reader directly into the locale of a story: “. .
.familiar sights—the carcasses hanging from hooks in the butcher shops; the
blacksmiths working their wooden wheels, hand-pumping their bellows; the
fruit merchants fanning flies off their grapes and cherries; the sidewalk
barber on the wicker chair stropping his razor.” He has an uncanny skill
to fold an entire story into a single image. Iqbal, disposed of his land by
a brutal mujahedeen, attempts to regain the land. He surrenders the legal
documents to a local judge. When he returns a few days later to receive
them with the judge’s certification, he learns that the documents had been
destroyed in “a small fire.” Iqbal’s son is telling the story to Adel, the
son of the mujahedeen. “And as he’s telling us that there’s nothing he can
do now without the papers, do you know what he has on his wrist? A
brand-new gold watch he wasn’t wearing the last time my father saw him.”
The connections
among the stories are not random. In an interview with Lois Alter Mark, in
HuffPost’s blog, Hosseini responds to a question about the title of the
book. He first credits William Blake with the inspiration, then refers to
the prevalence of mountains in the novel. He makes the comparison: “Just
as a mountain would echo back a shout, the fateful acts committed before the
mountains too emit an echo. They have a rippling effect, expanding outward,
touching lives further and further away. I liked the idea of a decision or
an act echoing through both place and time, altering the fates of characters
both living and not yet born.”
Pat Chaffee, OP
Racine, Wisconsin
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