Being a Bookworm!

Book Review by Smita Roy
Book: And the Mountains Echoed
Author: Khaled Hosseini
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Bloomsbury

And the Mountains Echoed

Many a times there comes a book in a book-lover’s life, which he truly indulgently falls in love with and does not seem to know what life would be once it ends. He reads it slow and steady, not wanting it to end, at the same time eagerly lapping up the words to know what happens next and where it is all going.

Khaled Hosseini has managed to do just that, third time in a row, with his latest addition to the Afghanistan stories –And the Mountains Echoed. He has the skill of a true storyteller, weaving words together to form simple yet heart-touching, sometimes heart-wrenching stories, with a narrative style one would use with children; though each line, each event, each character has several deep hidden layers that slowly come to the fore as each is revealed and a continuous flow of back stories crossing time zones come around.

Quite aptly, the book starts with the line, ‘So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one.’ From there on starts a journey, a real life journey of Abdullah and his sister Pari engulfing the reader in a way that the characters’ lives become the readers’ lives. Traveling through countries and continents, Abdullah and Pari finally meet after their separation in childhood, but at a ripe old age where Pari can barely walk and Abdullah hardly having any cognizance left in him. The irony of the situation almost pierces like a sword. Abdullah, having pained at the separation and being unable to forget Pari even for a brief moment in his entire life, to the extent that he has named his own daughter ‘Pari’, is totally unable to recognize his sister when she stands before him in flesh and blood, for he only remembers the tiny girl who would lovingly call him ‘Abollah’. As for Pari, she had been very young when the dreadful event happened and changed her course of life, so throughout her life there was a void somewhere yet she had no memory of what that void stood for; and now that she had dug into her history and found her long lost brother, the void has shifted from her to her brother. Very symbolically the author uses the Pont d’Avignon here to describe how sometimes happy endings are not that happy, just as the medieval bridge is unable to fill in the gap completely, in life too a little is always left out.

The introduction and the description of each character, which may first paint either a negative or a positive picture about the person, changes drastically when the back story of each is revealed, making you think about the old saying, everything is not as meets the eye. It is situations that make people and not vice versa. What is glorious and glittering and royal today, maybe just a forgotten ruin tomorrow.

It can be seen by way of the lives of the Wahdatis, both Suleiman and Nila, different personalities, poles apart, yet meet an unfulfilled end, which is more of a ruin. Despite adopting Pari, plucking her from her family tree would be more appropriate to describe here, their lives do not change much. Suleiman eventually suffers a stroke and left alone by Nila, only to be cared for, by Nabi, Pari’s step uncle and Suleiman’s loyal servant-cum-cook-cum-driver. And perhaps the reason for Nila and Suleiman’s separation too since Suleiman had different preferences in life and had been secretly in love with Nabi. Though Nabi on the other hand had been attracted to Nila, and to impress her or gain some attention from her, he had gone on to the extent to suggest adopting Pari, since Nila could not conceive. Pari got adopted but Nabi remained unloved by Nila and unknown to Suleiman’s love for a long time, earning some pity for Nabi from the readers, since initially it seemed like he had done it for money perhaps, but then it doesn’t take long to realize he was nothing but lovelorn.

Similarly, flamboyant, extravagant, poet Nila too remains unknown to Nabi’s love for her and keeps having disastrous affairs that send her more and more into depression and reducing her to nothing but a wine-drinking cigarette-smoking recluse, the last of which drives her to commit suicide.

Pari, gets the good life of education and luxury but again, besides the subconscious void of her brother she grows up without a father and a mother who is too busy in her own mess to really care, a lover who is way too practical for love (also the cause of her mother’s suicide) and a lovable husband who but doesn’t live long. She has children, but for looking after their financial needs, she barely has time remaining to be with them and by the time she does, they have all grown up and have their own independent lives away from her.

There are other characters whose role you may question but eventually you realize they are people who somewhere down the line aide in the reunion of Pari and Abdullah. Also their father Saboor and stepmother Parwana, each having their own tales behind, open one’s perception to view the world. What happened to the house and the family for all these years was wrapped up well with the description of Iqbal, Abdullah’s step-brother, and his family running around being homeless refugees post war in Afghanistan where their land had been captured by one of the war heroes whilst they had been taking refuge in Pakistan. What happened to Iqbal also documents the current scenario in the post war Afghanistan which is still unsettled and burning from within, living forever in fear of a new enemy each day, rising up to bombard them of their existence.

Dr. Markos Varvaris, who had a key role to bring the long lost souls together armed with Nabi’s letter he writ before his death, was from the Greek island Tinos, a surgeon working on the victims of war. With the description of his life, the author shows that even a doctor can cringe at the dreadful sight of a wound and sometimes we are lost on our paths only to find our true cause. However, for people who think that philanthropy may be a good way of living, it too comes at a cost of neglecting your own family and the people who truly need you, deserve you.

The narrative is more of confessions of each character, their shortcomings, their mistakes, and their justifications… their view of what is happening around them. Each revisiting a certain time, a certain incident, which is more like echoes of the same voice. Hence the title… that is my guess. With those confessions we realize that the same thing could be seen and would be seen differently from different perspectives. There is no wrong and no right around us but everything just is.