For 2018 one of my main goals was to read a book each month and so far so good. January was “Woman at Point Zero” by Nawal El Saadawi. Next month I’m trying to get my hands on Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider.” This February I had the chance to read Khaled Hosseini’s book “And the Mountains Echoed” and I was blown away yet again by his ability to sweep me up in a tale of sibling separation, Afghan history and family tribulations. What sets this book apart from his other popular novels like “The Kite Runner,” is the fact that the tale spans generations and countries, weaving together people’s lives to delve into the complex nature of sibling connections.
The book starts off with the words “You want a story and I will tell you one,” and Hosseini does just that. The reader is immediately thrown into an Afghan myth of a giant who comes and takes children from small villages. If the parents would choose just one kid to give up, he would spare the family. Eventually one man is so eaten up by his decision to give up his favorite son, he travels day and night to find the alleged giant’s house. The father finally arrives and meets the giant, who then gives him another terrible decision to make – to give his son a chance for a better life or to take him back to the village. The story told by the father Saboor to his two children in the desert is exactly what he ends up doing to his daughter Pari, tearing her apart from her brother Abdullah.
He trades in his daughter Pari to a wealthy family in Kabul where she ends up growing up thinking Suleiman and Nila Wahdati are her true parents. In the decades to come, Pari moves to Paris with Nila, gets married, has kids but always felt “the absence of something, or someone, fundamental to her own existence.” As for Abdullah, he ends up in California owning a kabob shop with his wife, but he never forgot Pari.
The rest of the book traverses across this web of lives taking the reader through a series of complex layers all while dragging out the eventual reunion of Pari and Abdullah. The delayed reunion isn’t frustrating because the other characters he introduces are just as rich and well thought out: Parwana, a character deeply weighed down by her guilt of hurting her sister in their youth, Nabi the uncle who made the deal to give up Pari who becomes a character you can sympathize with and Thalia, a character who struggles with a serious injury, eventually embracing it.
Hosseini even brings in characters who moved from Afghanistan before the war even began, like himself, who come back and feel like tourists in their own countries. He really plays on his own experience of survivor guilt in his ability to leave before the conflict when he writes about the two characters Idris and Timur. This connection between the United States and Afghanistan makes the story a global one as families are moved and split up. As the story goes on and more characters are introduced, the chance of connection between Abdullah and Pari seem farther and farther away.
I won’t ruin the end but just know it’s beautiful and bound to make you cry. This is a must read and kept me on the edge of my seat the whole way through. I’ll leave you with this quote, “I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us” (and maybe reading this book will be that something).