Sunday 31 January 2016

And the Mountains Echoed. By Khaled Hosseini

And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini

Riverhead Books. First published 2013.


Khaled Hosseini does not write about Afghanistan. At least, not in this book. He is an American writer, writing here about slightly exotic Americans (or Europeans) who happen to have origins or connections in Afghanistan. The sensibilities are all American (or All-American), i.e., very Reader's Digesty. 

The story, a small portion of it, concerns a brother and sister growing up together for a few sweet years as children in a remote Afghan village. They separated when very young. Many, many years later they meet again, when the sister is invalidated by severe arthritic pain, and the brother by Alzheimer's. This accounts for about a tenth of the book, but still, somehow, provides the underlying tension throughout. We keep waiting for the reunion, which, when it comes, is anticlimactic.  

The other nine tenths of the story is divided into three tenuously connected parts. One part follows the sister and her early childhood as the adopted daughter of very rich parents in Kabul. The parents divorce, and the mother, a 'liberated' woman in 1960's Afghanistan, separates from the homosexual father and takes her daughter to Paris. This thread then follows the two women in Europe, mainly Paris, with no reference, really, to anything that happened, or is happening, 'back home' in Afghanistan. These parts read vaguely like many of the 'Americans-in-Paris' books, by F. Scott Fitzgerald for example (though that comparison is a far reach). The second thread sticks to Afghans and Afghanistan. This story of the driver, caretaker and, in the latter's dying moments, the lover, of the rich father, also the uncle of the brother and sister, who played a crucial role in the sale of the girl, is narrated partly in his own voice and partly in that of a Greek doctor. The doctor is gamely bearing the white man's burden in a Kabul being rebuilt after the Soviets have been driven back, and his story, a fairly conventional bitter-sweet tale, which takes place mainly in an island in Greece, forms the third thread, largely unconnected from the rest the book.

I would characterize the book as beautifully written soppiness. The language is lovely, and the writing smooth. Many descriptions are wonderfully lyrical. But it's all froth, and not much substance. To repeat, the book is not about Afghanistan, it's about America. 

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