Book Nook: And The Mountains Echoed

When an author can pull of the type of storytelling that embeds stories within stories it can either be a marvelous reading experience or a confusing loop of characters and places. Khaled Hosseini blends character and story expertly in And the Mountains Echoed, but I found several of the vignettes to be interesting, yet off the point. It does all tie together at the end, but there were points within certain narratives that could have been summed up in one sentence at the end. My favorite example of this was, "my mother handed me a shovel and said fill up the holes in me".

The bookclub I read this with did not particularly care for this story because they felt that the characters of Abdullah and Pari were too well written and they were just dropped for the majority of the book. Hosseini builds his characters with such intricacy, but it was hard for my readers to realize that they weren't the focus of this story. The whole narrative begins because of a single action and it is this action that reaches out and echoes through generations. The original actors are at the epicenter of the action and we see their story unfold through the eyes of the outsiders.

I was going to say that nothing about this book was happy, but that isn't exactly true. Happiness resides in the absences. Characters find happiness, lose it, cherish it, and sometimes they find it again, but it is only in the face of loss that one really appreciates the things that make us happy and complete.

Hosseini expertly weaves a tapestry of people, place, and plot without sacrificing one element of storytelling to strengthen another. If you like the the idea of stories within stories The Hand that First Held Mine, is story split in two between the past and present, but they echo each other until the resolution. In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente is the first in a  fantasy series that embeds tale after tale in a series of Scheherazade type stories leading to a ultimate reveal after it resolves each individual story in order. If the realism of the story really appeals to you I'd maybe suggest The Things They Carried or In the Lake of the Woods which has alternate layers of truth that the author presents the reader in order to choose which truth is real.

*This blog is part of a grant Medfield has been awarded through the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Library and Services Technology Act administered by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners.