And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Khaled Hosseini’s story telling is that most – if not all – the dramatis personae exude goodness and love. This was true of his first book, The Kite Runner and it is certainly so of the third I have read – And the Mountain Echoed.

It is a tale that spawns decades and continents. It is a weave of an amazingly constructed web – of separation and reunion, longing and fulfillment, centrifugal and centripetal pulls that cause drifts in opposite directions. Khaled Hosseini is not afraid to scoop up every human emotion and color his canvas with it. He is aiming at your heart and knows how to tug at it, gently but relentlessly.

At the very root is the love of a young brother Abdullah for his little sister Pari, both of a family living in penury in a village in Afghanistan of 1950s. The two are separated early in life and the rest of the story is a collage of many seemingly disparate lives that inhabit France and the US and Greece and Italy and, of course, Afghanistan through its roller-coaster history, and seem to bear barely tenuous six-degrees-of-separation connections. And yet, you hope against hope that somehow a miracle is lying in happy ambush to join dots invisible to the naked eye.

It is a beautiful story, told by a generously loving heart. Recommended!  

Unaccustomed earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Reading a story by Jhumpa Lahiri’s is like watching a slow moving stream. Events move ever so slowly, even pausing and lingering in a swirl and evoking curiosity about the direction they are headed in. There are no overtly cataclysmic and watershed moments, no tipping points that explain the past and reveal the future. In other words the stories mirror life itself, mostly linear and zigzagging and uneventful but quietly shaping us all the time, gathering possibilities and potentials at every step.

The stories, all set in the backdrop of the life of Indian immigrants in the West, are about longing, aspirations, love and deep seated emotions that are rarely, if ever, allowed to leap out of our skin. They are also about death and how it posthumously defines and shape others around us.

The prose is lyrical and alert to details, perceptively diving into each character and then out to rest on every detail that might add depth to the tale. No words are wasted and yet none are denied expression. The eight stories are a pleasure to read.

Post Script: Inside the back-cover I found the portrait of Ms Lahiri. Her gorgeousness brought back the silent remark I had made to Him when I first saw Yahoo! CEO and President Marissa Mayer’s picture: “Are you not going overboard in loading it in favour of some?” I had asked.