Skip to main content

Book review: And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

(No spoilers)

In one word, I'd say it was disappointing.

Having read The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, I had formed an opinion about Khaled Hosseini as a master story-teller, someone who can twist your heart and make your eyes swell up with tears by just playing with words. When my copy of And The Mountains Echoed arrived, I was really eager to read it because I expected it to be like his other two books, a heart wrenching yet beautiful story.



And The Mountains Echoed is, in the beginning, the story of two siblings who are forced to be separated from each other. It opens in the fictional village of Shadbagh, and from there the author takes the readers to many places including Kabul, Paris and San Francisco. Pari and her elder brother Abdullah, as inseparable as Juno's swans, are eventually estranged by fate.



The story, all in all, was a touching one. He manages to make us feel the plight of his characters' hardships and how the choices they have to make change their lives forever. Afghanistan is, like his other two books, very well portrayed in this one too. The love between the two siblings and the sacrifices they have to make strike a chord somewhere.

Hosseini has experimented in this book, by shifting from the conventional single person and single tense narration to alternating between first person and third person, and switching from the past to present multiple times within a chapter. I'm not sure if this worked out too well. It made the book pretty confusing for me.

In the beginning, he introduces the main characters and makes the readers create a bond with them, only to leave it there. As the novel progresses, it gets multi-layered with additions of new characters in almost every chapter. As a reader, I found it difficult to connect with them. The book spans over three generations (fifty-five years, I believe) and too many places. Irrelevant chapters seemed to keep dragging on, while I was more concerned about what was happening to other older characters. Too many simultaneous stories, unnecessary characters and changes make the book a rather tiring and complex read. The ending was hushed up, and it seemed like it was struggling to gain pace after a couple of slow chapters. I, for one, felt like I was being made to aimlessly wander through superfluous details.

While And The Mountains Echoed is a good stand-alone book, it wouldn't be on my list of favourite books.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Circular Economy is Not "Recycling on Steroids"

Written by Kruti Munot , with Pavithra Mohanraj and Priyal Shah  as part of a series with Infinitive . Cross-posted from Linkedin .  Over the last year, we’ve discussed ideas around the circular economy (CE) with a range of people - from students and mentees, to companies and government stakeholders. When we start introducing the CE , the most common response is “ do you mean better recycling? ” But (in the words of Ken Webster ), viewing the circular economy as simply “recycling on steroids” ignores some of its most powerful aspects. This post is an attempt to demystify what the CE really is (and isn’t) - based on conversations we’ve had with multiple stakeholders from our work at Infinitive. Q: Plastic bottles are recycled. Isn’t that part of the circular economy? It is circular to recover waste and put it back into production, but very few materials actually get recycled this way. Most are “down-cycled” into products of lower quality and functionality. Ultimately

Everything is interconnected: Dropping cats and thinking in systems

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Oh wait, this isn’t fiction. Or Star Wars. A not-so-long time ago, on an island not-so-far away, it literally rained cats. Cats in parachutes.                                                                                             Yep. ( image source ) In the early 1950s, Borneo was affected by a serious malaria outbreak. The World Health Organization, as part of their antimalarial campaign, sprayed houses on the island with insecticide DDT to kill the mosquito vector responsible for the spread of the disease. And it worked, the number of cases of malaria reduced. However, there were some other serious consequences. 

On Being a Teen

[Edit: Nearly two years after writing this, I  realize how quickly I've grown and thoughts have changed over time, I feel quite differently about being a teenager now! I'm pretty sure I'll say this again next year...] Someone asked what it feels like to be a teenager in 2014.  I'm 17, and I can say, being a teen is something I like as much as I dislike: There are way too many  opportunities  today in 2014, but way too much  competition  too. The idea of being "above-average" has been drilled into our heads, it seems like a normal average person can get nowhere today. There's a bundle of  expectations  from us kids. I have self-set expectations too. Seeing so many people do brilliant things at this age makes me want to be like one of them too. I feel  connected . Technology arrived the right time for our generation, in my opinion. I am Indian, but the whole "global citizen" concept means a lot to me. The internet has helped me connect