Khaled
Hosseini’s third novel, And the Mountains
Echoed, does not live up to expectations. The novel is well-written, full
of beautiful prose and poetic images, but the story is stale, fractured, and,
though compelling at times, is mostly dull. Hosseini’s focus on love, family,
and the impoverished landscape of a war-torn Afghanistan, themes that gave life
to his novels The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has not
diminished. Yet, while Hosseini cannot escape his characteristic concerns,—and,
perhaps, he is not trying to escape them—And
the Mountains Echoed feels like an attempt to escape being pigeon-holed as
a certain type of story-teller.
The
form of Hosseini’s third novel is vastly different from his first two novels.
Instead of following a single narrative perspective, Hosseini has decided to
give each chapter a different narrative perspective. Each chapter becomes its
own vignette, telling a different story that somehow intersects with the lives
of a single Afghan family spanning several generations. In many cases, members
of the Afghan family are not the focalizing voices; rather, someone that they
interact with is the focalizing voice. Throughout the novel, only a few
focalizing voices are aware of the relationships to which readers are privy.
For example, one focal character frequents a restaurant owned and run by one of
the Afghan family’s members, in America. Unbeknownst to the focal character, or
the Afghan running the restaurant, the focal character has just recently met
the restaurateur’s uncle in Afghanistan. These small connections pervade the
novel, and make the reader gasp with surprise and exalt in the thrill of
discovery—at least they do the first few times that they occur.
But,
such thrills are cheap, easy to create, and cannot sustain energy for the whole
of the novel. Soon, the reader realizes that these private little victories are
not propelling the novel’s story to become anything more than it is: a
disjointed narrative with an unrealistic series of character connections. Soon,
the reader grows bored with such—well, it’s hard to call them thrills when they
lose their capability to excite—instances, and each vignette’s relationship to
the others becomes less compelling. Hosseini seems to have wanted to write
something that was less like a novel, and that was more like a collection of
related short stories; however, his intention is plainly to bring each vignette
into such a close relationship with the others, and to close out the tale as if
it were some great frame narrative that has finally come together. The
resulting novel is unsuccessful as such, and perhaps Hosseini would have done
better to have written the short stories he seems to have desperately wanted to
write.
The
book is not without its successes. The first two chapters of the book, the two
that are perhaps the most closely related chapters of all those in the book, are
beautifully written, wonderfully intriguing, and emotionally brilliant pieces.
In the first two chapters, we see Hosseini writing at his best. The first
chapter takes the form of bedtime story, told by an Afghan father in the
fictional village of Shadbagh to his two young children. The allegory
establishes the novel’s theme that hard choices and sacrifices must be made for
love. The second chapter tells the story of the children and their father going
on a trip to Kabul, where they will meet with the children’s step-uncle, Nabi,
and his wealthy employers, the Wahdati’s, with whom the father hopes to make a
financial arrangement. The second chapter is set-up perfectly by the story from
the first chapter. The themes established in the father’s bedtime story play
out brilliantly in the journey to Kabul, and it becomes obvious that the father
had developed his bedtime story as an allegory for the children’s
entertainment, as a way of explaining himself to them.
Throughout,
the novel is deeply in touch with the emotions of its characters. Hosseini does
a good job of making his characters come to life, of revealing the sacrifices
that they have made for the love of their families, and depicting the hard
choices that they must continue to make. He shows that an emotional affinity—one
that is sometimes hard for us to see in our everyday lives—exists among all
people, regardless of economic station, nationality, gender, age, or domicile.
He shows that a Greek doctor can struggle with the same decisions as a first
generation American-Afghan artist, and that an Afghan exile in twenty-first
century America can suffer the same fate as an affluent Afghan in mid-twentieth
century.
The
power of And the Mountains Echoed
lies in the characters and their emotions, and not particularly in the
over-arching story. The novel is slow at times, difficult to engage with, but
it always picks up, at least for a time. The book is certainly less
exhilarating than Hosseini’s other two novels, and I would not recommend it to
anyone who has yet to read Hosseini’s other work. For those who have read
Hosseini’s other work, the novel will strike a chord and resonate an affinity with
his other novels. This is not a must read, but it certainly has value, even if
that value only lies in the emotions it invokes, the beauty of its prose, and
the images of its poetry.
JCM
16 June 2013
