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.
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