Don’t expect his review to be a long one because I honestly don’t have the words to describe how I felt reading this beautifully written book. From the moment I read the interesting first line – “So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one. But just the one…” – I was preparing myself for an absorbing story, but I didn’t anticipate how truly exquisite the experience would be. Khaled Hosseini is indeed a masterful storyteller, but this novel also proves that he is a masterful writer as well. Unlike his previous 2 novels, Hosseini employs a unique structure this time around in the form of a series of interlinked stories across nine chapters, each narrated from the perspective of a different character. The format is nonlinear, with the narrative jumping back and forth between various settings (from Afghanistan to Paris to California to the Greek island of Tinos) and timelines (1940s through 2010). Each chapter comes across vignette-like, where we get a glimpse into the life of each individual character, some of whom narrate their own stories in first person, while others are told in third person, with one chapter that is completely epistolary. On the surface, it may not be readily apparent how each character’s story correlates with the other, but once I got to the end of the book, I couldn’t help but marvel at Hosseini’s genius in structuring the narrative this way. Interconnectedness is a huge theme in the novel and Hosseini demonstrates this in multiple ways – through the plot and story, through the characters, and especially through the narrative’s structure.
Emotionally, this was one of those books that was simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting -- to the point that I lost count of how many times the story and its characters broke my heart and then put it back together again. There were many moving and poignant moments that triggered a jumble of different emotions – sadness, anger, confusion, awe, wonder, surprise, relief, dread, hope, etc. (just to name a few). Hosseini presents humanity and all its emotional complexities in such a realistic (yet not overwhelming) way that you get the sense he truly understands human nature -- the ‘good, bad, and ugly’ that resides in all of us. The story is filled with flawed characters who find themselves in various morally and ethically ambiguous dilemmas – much life we would in real life – yet through it all, and despite the poor decisions that some of them make, I felt like I understood where they were coming from and so I couldn’t help wanting to root for all of them (with the exception of one or two characters). This is illustrated best through the words of one of the story’s most prominent characters, Dr. Markos, a Greek plastic surgeon who dedicates many years of his life providing care to those in Afghanistan who sustained physical injuries and deformities from the violence and fighting: “If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behaviour is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.”
I’ve had Khaled Hosseini on my list of “must-read” authors for years (on the advice of multiple trusted reader friends who are huge fans of his works) and actually have all 3 of his novels sitting on my shelf, but regretfully, I hadn’t been able to get to his works until now. I started with And the Mountains Echoed first because that is the novel I’m studying in my Literature class, but I hope to also read his two previous (and even more famous) novels at some point as well.
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