I read ‘The Kite Runner’ several years ago and remember enjoying it a lot. Sadly, I never wrote anything about it so I can’t say why or compare it to this book. Certainly, ‘And The Mountains Echoed’ has much to recommend it. The prose is smooth and flowing. The sentences are short and evocative. The characters and settings are varied and rich. Details are well chosen and pithily expressed. However, it also had a sentimental quality most obvious in its extremely dramatic and shocking plot. Much of the dialogue also had this quality in a way that’s harder to pin down but permeated the whole text.
The story is woven together using nine perspectives, each contained in a chapter. These are: 1) A poor Afghan farmer (Saboor) taking his two children (Abdullah and Pari) to Kabul and telling them a story on the journey through the desert (1952) 2) The same farmer selling his daughter (Pari) to a wealthy, childless family (Wahdatis) where a relative (Nabi) works when they reach Kabul (1952) 3) Saboor’s second wife’s (Parwana) story of how she pushed her sister (Masooma) off a tree because she was jealous of her good looks and found out she was going to marry Saboor (1949) 4) Nabi’s story of working for Mr Wahdati and their long shared history 5) the story of two brothers (Idris and Timur) who are Afghans who emigrated to the US during the wars and used to live on the same street as Nabi and the Wahdatis. They come back to try and reclaim their property in Kabul (2003) 6) the story of Pari and Mrs Wahdati’s life in Paris after she leaves Mr Wahdati when he has a stroke (1974) 7) the story of a jihadi turned drug lord and his family who move to the village where Abdullah and Pari were born. The pair’s half brother attempts to reclaim his property from the gangster following time as a refugee in Pakistan (2009) 8) the story of the life of a Greek plastic surgeon (Markos) who lives in the Wahdati’s house when Nabi owns it (2010) 9) the story of Pari reconnecting with Abdullah in America and the relationship between her and Abdullah’s daughter (2010).
Some of the characters and the depth of emotional perception are really good. The brothers in chapter five, for example. However, I sometimes felt like the story was flitting around too much. The emphasis on the clever interconnections between the stories was too heavy and detracted from the quality of the individual stories themselves. For example, at the end of Chapter 5 the child who Idris agrees to help but then ends up ignoring seemingly thanks his brother, Timur, in the dedication to her book. This isn’t explored in any detail and is almost a throwaway whereas I felt it could have been interestingly expanded as another example of the brothers’ relationship, which was a highlight for me. Equally, Chapter 4, the story of Nabi, was really good partly because it didn’t have complicated interconnections that have to be worked out. In some ways I thought this aspect of the novel was overdone and not always successful. There are too many stories and they are too disparate. It’s like Hosseini is trying to do too much in one book. That said, the passing reference to ‘Abe’s Kabob House’ in Chapter 5, which is then explored in detail in Chapter 9, was really well done. I thought it spoke poignantly about the upheaval and change of migration and life as an immigrant and was very well handled.
Against the good writing, powerful characters and scenes, the book is somewhat overly dramatic. The whole thing is so stuffed full of tragedy and is so eventful it sometimes feels like watching a soap opera where something shocking has to happen every five minutes to keep the audience engaged. At times this felt facile, gratuitous and simplistic. Against this criticism, one of the main themes of the book is the turmoil and misery wrecked by the wars in Afghanistan so perhaps it is unfair to criticise the author’s attempts to place this in the foreground. Nonetheless, even the more domestic portions of the book that take place outside of Afghanistan can feel histrionic and overblown. The book is undoubtedly moving but sometimes it feels like the reader’s heartstrings are being pulled a little too hard a little too often!
This was an enjoyable, varied and readable book. I had a few issues with the structure and the intensity and frequency of its dramatic episodes but overall I would recommend it.
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