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!
No comments:
Post a Comment