You must first prepare for that tightening in your stomach, like there is a hole inside you, when you take in the bleak setting at the beginning of Hosseini’s books, invariably some severely impoverished and windswept province of Afghanistan.
You must also get used to finding little nests of affection—only to see those nests torn asunder by random misfortune as well as fateful choices. It is not a stretch to say Hosseini writes some of the saddest books in the English language.
That he also is a splendid writer of sad stories is proven by the critical and commercial success of Hosseini’s previous two books: 2007’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns”; and 2003’s “The Kite Runner,” which was adapted into a motion picture that earned Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. Both books were about the importance of family and the damage of fate, both exceedingly haunting in their sadness.
So one can certainly expect more of the same from Hosseini’s newest book, “And the Mountains Echoed: A Novel” (Riverhead Books, New York, 2013, 402 pages)—except that here, there is even more of what usually distinguishes a Hosseini novel.
“A thousand tragedies per square mile,” a character explains.
“The suffering, the despair in this place, is like a wave. It rolls out from every bed, smashes against the moldy walls, and swoops back toward you. You can drown in it,” Hosseini writes.
Readers need to be prepared for the gut-wrenching
Magical creature
“Echoed” begins in the small, fictional Afghan village of Shadbagh in 1952, where a poor man named Saboor tells his children Abdullah and Pari a story about a magical creature known as a div. The children call their father Baba—the Afghan word for “father”—and soon their life is hopelessly fractured by a difficult act of mercy that separates Abdullah and Pari.
From here, “Echoed” scatters its characters all over the world even as Afghanistan is transformed forever by the Taliban takeover as well as the Western invasion afterward.
The pain comes from the fact that many of these separations happen because of kindness: “Don’t stay for me,” one character pleads.
Hosseini does this kind of trick very well: He separates families to the point when they are seemingly forever apart, and then slowly, carefully, brings them together again, whether those characters know it or not. There is always a pattern to the comings and goings of Hosseini’s creations, something you can also observe in the same names given to multiple characters.
Terror of absences
One other thing Hosseini does well is realistically and painstakingly plotting the years as they go by from 1949 to 2010, moving the novel’s action from Afghanistan to France to Greece to California, charting the tracks of the characters as they move from life to life, from hovel to mansion and back again.
Here, Hosseini uses both flashbacks and documents like letters and articles to tie the disparate lives together, though it takes a close reading to see all those connections.
The biggest connections in “Echoed” are the lost ones. Ultimately, the book is about the terror of absences; how such a gap can hover over the length of a lifetime and touch everything it covers: “There has been in her life, all her life, a great absence. Somehow she has always known.”
These are lives lost to time and regret.
With its sweeping scenes and parade of characters, “Echoed” is Hosseini’s most ambitious book yet, building on the devices he first used to good effect in “The Kite Runner.”
As always, Hosseini’s magnificent prose, with its diamond-like passages, shine in all the right places: “His love for me was as true, vast, and permanent as the sky, and that it would always bear down upon me. It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.”
Yet there is one big difference here. As “Echoed” marches to its conclusion, Hosseini brings out a surprise spark of brightness amid the expected sadness. That is why “And the Mountains Echoed” is truly a standout. It is not only Khaled Hosseini’s most ambitious book, it is also his most optimistic book so far.
Available in hardcover at National Book Store.