New Mexico Mercury

Hosseini,  Khaled,  And the Mountains Echoed  NY: Riverhead Books 2013 ($28.95)

Beautifully wrought, with rich dialogue and painterly evocation of the landscape, Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed  (2013) follows not only in the tradition of his own excellent work from the Kite Runner (2003) on, but in the literature about Afghanistan. The book follows in the grand tradition of Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwala (1892) which  like this one, tells, the story of the diasporic Afghan, impoverished, travelling for work, separated from his own daughter and another he attempts to make his own. Both books tell of the unhappiness of late life reunions. In the manner of Scheherazade’s telling, the book opens with a parable that Abdullah and Pari’s father tells them as he is taking them to Kabul from his village.  He has arranged to give away, for a price, his young daughter Pari (literally fairy) to his new wife’s brother Nabi.  Nabi is a devoted servant to the Wahdati family. The Wahdatis, Nila and Suleiman have their own problematic marriage, she left infertile by an unnamed surgery in India and Suleiman, who is homoerotically attracted to his chauffeur, a sadness that Nila is able to articulate many years later in Paris after she has become a successful poet there. She is the product of a French mother and an Afghan father. Upon her husband’s paralysis, she takes little Pari and moves to Paris. The life of this little village girl is totally transformed as she is educated, and becomes a Mathematics professor. The story is told to us by the Bashiris, neighbors of the Wahdatis who have moved to California and have become successful cosmopolitan elites. 

On their travel back to Afghanistan to reclaim their properties abandoned in hurried escapes to the States, the Bashiris encounter not only the poverty and anger festering in Afghanistan but the inhumanity that has plagued the peoples there as they encounter a little girl Roshan left hospitalized by the anger and greed of an uncle who has slaughtered her family. Poignantly Hosseini critiques his own people:

He might have said something some offering of impotent outrage, if this had been the work of the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda or some megalomaniac Mujahideen commander. But this cannot be blamed on Hekmatyar, or Mullah Omar, or Bin Laden, or Bush and his war on terror. The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible and far more depressing. (150)

Back home Dr. Bashiri, presumably Hosseini himself, remarks, “Kabul is a thousand tragedies per square mile."(163)

Interwoven with this story of multi-generational families, is the violent history of Afghanistan, one that President Bush could well have learned from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, a history that tells us that no one wins in Afghanistan, not the Mughals, the Russians, the British or now the Americans. It is the terrain and the inherent tendencies of the Afghan peoples that are the victors, which is why this proud race, speaking both Farsi and Pushtu, will remain fiercely independent. Resistance runs in the blood.

But it is also the story of those of us who are Sub-Continental diasporic peoples. In fact throughout the literary interview with Nila, a device which Hosseini uses to tell us her story, and the part of this story set in California, runs the question of home and belonging, asking ultimately, “does anyone ever belong anywhere, totally.” How different is the life of these émigrés from that of those in the refugee camps? In fact, towards the end of the book, Hosseini gives us this truism, as it were, “If I have learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story.” (330) How many of us can say this about ourselves.

This is a book not about Afghan politics, Islamic politics or about US intervention in Afghanistan. This is a book about our own politics. How we can live with ourselves and with each other, about self- reflection, the beauty that lives within each of us, which when found can change the world of its various violences. In this, it is a beautiful book. “Beauty is an enormous unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.” (330)

Editor's note: Hosseini will be in conversation with New Mexico inFocus host Gene Grant on Sunday June 9 at 7pm.  The event is sponsored by Bookworks.  Tickets available online and at Bookworks.