And His Mountains Echoed-Writer Khaled Hosseini on Story

By Mike Takeuchi

Previously published article. (Book Review Below) 

  In his 48 years on this earth, writer Khaled Hosseini has already lived a life worthy of the novels he has penned.  And from the time he was a young child in Kabul Afghanistan, through a family move to Paris, subsequent political asylum and citizenship in the U.S. a year after the Soviet invasion of his country, and eventually a successful medical practice before a prolific literary career, the two constants in his life have been family and the stories that have accompanied it.

   And now, following his publishing of the 2003 novel “The Kite Runner” an international bestseller that was adapted into a feature film as well as another bestseller 2007’s  “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, Riverhead Publishing has recently released his third piece of fiction “And the Mountains Echoed”-a multi-generational family saga that spans generations of people whose locations parallel his own path. The story begins in Afghanistan, the same place he learned the wonders of story as a child as Mr. Hosseini fondly recalled. 

AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED BY KHALED HOSSEINI

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

    “There were a number of really good storytellers from my childhood, but my grandmother was the most consistent one,” Mr. Hosseini said. “She was very good at telling them whether they were completely made up with creatures like the div in the opening chapter of this novel or (they were) us experiences from her childhood like the time she went to Mecca with her mother when she was a little girl.  Maybe it was my personal bias and I am blinded by nostalgia, but I thought they were the best because she was a ready storyteller and I had a willing ear to take in those stories.”

   From those tales, a young storyteller developed his own craft.

“When I was a kid I remember very distinctly the parties we would have two or three times a week,” he said. “Our families socialized a great deal and we always had no fewer than 10 kids around.  One of the games we used to play was to sit around the room and each person would have to get up and tell a story.  And either it was good and people would ask them to continue, or it was bad and they would stop.”

  “I guess I was good because I remember when it was my turn I always felt a kind of hush descended on the room and it seemed like people were really tuned in,” Mr. Hosseini said. “That was sort of one of the first times I noticed that I really enjoyed that effect of telling a story and have somebody pay attention. So I started writing them down when I was 9 or 10-years-old.”

  Years later, the author inserted one of his childhood stories it into his first novel “The Kite Runner” .In the novel, Amir, a young Afghan boy tells his best friend Hassan a story of a poor, but happy man who found a magic cup that makes him rich provided he could produce tears.   Greed eventually overcomes the man and he eventually tragically loses all that is important to him.

  Throughout his young life while attending high school and Santa Clara University  in Northern California, the author continued to write up until he attended medical school at the UC San Diego where the demands of his training forced him to stop.  It wasn’t until he started practicing internal medicine in 1996 that he resumed writing.

  A year-and-a-half after the release of “The Kite Runner”, which by then was in the midst of spending 101 weeks on the bestseller list (four weeks at the top spot), the physician left his  practice to write full time.  In 2007, Riverhead published “A Thousand Splendid Suns” a novel that came from a female perspective that also spent weeks on the bestseller lists and has been adapted into a film scheduled to be released in 2015.

  While on that tour as well as acting as a Goodwill Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) through his own foundation, Mr. Hosseini traveled to Afghanistan and was struck by a scene of a father towing two young children in a Radio Flyer red wagon.

  “I was waiting for an idea that just kind of hit me and this thing happened with the man in the desert,” he said.  

  What followed was a six-year process of trial and error that initially didn’t produce the results he desired.  On top of this, his father Nasser had fallen seriously ill in 2007 and his writing stopped when Mr. Hosseini and his wife Roya assisted his mother Maimoona as Nasser Hosseini’s caregiver.

  “I just wasn’t in the mood to write,” Mr. Hosseini explained.

  Toward the end of his father’s life in November 2009, Khaled Hosseini began to complete “And the Mountains Echoed” in earnest taking two and a half years from that point to finish.

   While the book’s central themes evolve around the lives of a brother by the name of Abdullah and his sister named Pari, it expands beyond an even extended family that endures life and death and the realization of their fates through their actions.  It is a book that is partially influenced by his own experiences, including his father’s passing.

  “Certainly that last year of my dad’s life was very vivid in my mind and some of the passages were quite a conscious annotation to my own experience because part of this book is about people who have become the victims of time,” Mr. Hosseini said.  “But ultimately, this story is about the pull of the family. It's about how we want to belong to something bigger than ourselves and how no matter how far apart we are, we have this longing for reunion and finding each other. While we may be separated by time or by physical space to stretch the fibers of our being, the strength is so that they won't snap. They just bring you back.”

  While there are similar central things of family and memory, “And the Mountains Echoed” is entirely different from Mr. Hosseini’s first two books in the sense of voice as well as its nonlinear pattern, which spans nearly eight decades.

 “I wanted each chapter to reveal something to advance the story from something the reader already read. But I wanted each chapter to more or less stand on its own to some extent and be a part of something bigger that collectively can tell one big story. And that meant each chapter had to come to some dramatically satisfying resolution.  It couldn't be a straightforward narrative novel where you can kind of bleed one chapter to the next and go onto the next thing and it just jumps forward.”

  After joking that his biggest thrill about writing the book was completing it, Mr. Hosseini said that he felt an enormous sense of relief that after going down several blind alleys into dead ends, the different paths joined together in a satisfying conclusion.

   “It was more challenging to write and to some extent it is more challenging for readers to read because it does require a more active engagement with the story,” Mr. Hosseini said. “You do have to connect dots and you do have to pay attention and remember things.  You will have moments where you will be ‘Oh now I get why this happens and what this character meant’.   I have really loved books like that-ones that make me re-read earlier parts to understand what I'm reading now so I am actively engaged with the story.  Hopefully, the readers feel the same.”

Review "And the Mountains Echoed"

By Mike Takeuchi

  A few weeks ago at a local restaurant, a local woman named Diane spotted this writer with a preview copy of Khaled Hosseini's "And the Mountains Echoed"  and expressed that she had long anticipated the latest work of a writer that penned both the 2003 bestseller "The Kite Runner" and successful 2007 follow-up "A Thousand Splendid Suns"-two books that sold a combined 38-million copies.   Well, Diane and many others will discover that "And the Mountains Echoed" is a work that is well-worth the wait.

  It is fitting in more ways than one that Mr. Hosseini's latest book title is derived from a line (“And the hills echoed”) from William Blake's poem "The Nurse's Song"  and altered it to reflect his native Afghanistan's mountainous topography. Because "And the Mountains Echoed" combines the love the author has for family, memories and his place of birth with the lyrical flow of the Rumi poem that precedes a story that beautifully interweaves the multi-generational saga of an Afghani family and the people who they affect and, in turn, affect them.

   The nonlinear story, in which the writer got the idea while observing a man pull two children in a red wagon during a 2007 trip to Afghanistan with the UN Refugee Agency, begins simply enough by examining the close relationship between a young boy Abdullah and his even younger sister Pari who live together in a remote Afghani village with their father and stepmother.

    The two are as happy as can be until the impoverished family’s father gives up three-year-old Pari for adoption to a well-to-do couple who live in Kabul via an uncle while 10-year-old Abdullah sadly stays to live with his family.  While Abdullah's thoughts are about the lament of losing his sister, Pari and her adoptive mother Nila, an accomplished poet, leave Afghanistan due to unforeseen circumstances and move to Paris, it further tears the siblings apart.

 From there the story expands into something akin to a complex literary labyrinth whose pathways are ultimately revealed in each of the next eight chapters-each coming from a different person's perspective over a period of eight decades. For the first time in Mr. Hosseini's literary body of work, extends beyond the boundaries of his native Afghanistan, into Greece, Northern California as well as the aforementioned Paris.

  In his most ambitious work to date in terms of story structure and perspective shift, Mr. Hosseini successfully challenges active readers to not only navigate through the story but to understand and empathize with the complexities of the decisions the book's characters face.  In this sense, much like bringing a scorecard to a ballgame, perhaps having a pen and notebook nearby would be helpful to see the connections the characters have with their emotions and actions as well as with each other.

   Because of Mr. Hosseini’s style, "And the Mountains Echoed" is a work that's not necessarily a page-turner rushing headlong toward a conclusion, but rather a book that is to be savored before it is ultimately ingested-especially during its satisfying climax.  In this book more than the others, Mr. Hosseini has proven to be a master craftsman who can cull together the tale of the fates of his characters without having to state it obviously.

  But most importantly in "And the Mountains Echoed", the former physician has once again proven to be adept at not just ripping out one's heartstrings but rather precisely removing them with surgical precision before gently repairing them through his superlative storytelling ability -leaving the reader sighing or perhaps shedding a tear or two after the last word is read.  This writer's only disappointment is that readers may have to wait another half-decade before Khaled Hosseini's next book.