Skip to main content

Book Review: And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

If there are stories coming out of the enchanting wild of Africa, it is through Wilbur Smith. And if from Afghanistan, well it has to be Khaled Hosseini. The world-renowned author has previously penned down bestsellers like ‘The Kite Runner’ and ‘The Thousand Splendid Suns’. This is his third novel (And The Mountains Echoed), after a gap of around six years. Again, this novel is, too, back staged against the stony, windy land of Afghanistan. From the Hosseini’s novels, it stands out that this land knows nothing but hardship and tragedy and pain.


"You want a story and I will tell you one," Hosseini begins and takes us to 1952.

A father is telling his children a tale as old as time as they begin their journey through the deep valleys and majestic mountain towards Kabul. Pari, the three-year-old daughter, has an unusually powerful bond to his elder brother Abdullah. He has been her protector, a shoulder to rely on, and a source of happiness to each other all this time. The two siblings do not understand the horrible fate that is approaching them, the echoes of the coming event will change their course of lives upside down. A sacrifice has to be made, a decision, like a small ripple in the water, that's all it takes, which will haunt through the leaps of time. There will be loss, deception, trauma, and age-old scars yet redemption with a bit of twist.

Hosseini is the magician who can take his reader throughout the story with a flow like poetry. Though this book is severely intense and one of the hardest to read, yet, this could keep you hooked with a yearning you hoped from the very beginning.

This novel was high on hopes for the Hosseini fans. You might enjoy as how the author took his own sweet time to narrate this story from the perspective of his multiple characters (kind of interconnected short stories). It may surprise you to see how every character was developed intense, how each of them had an equally important story to tell. It almost seemed like an invisible chasm between all of them which unknowingly caused a bigger contribution soon. How with the unraveling of the mysteries of their lives, their actions echoed.

Above everything else which may have appealed to you most is that this old Afghanistan is full of privation, it scares people who live there and who left, there is conflict, oppression of identity. Yet the book celebrates the magical bond between a brother and his sister.

It shows people with passionate and unconventional desires, their choice of expression and freedom, we see both sides of our close-to-heart relationships. This book is highly recommend to anyone who wants to experience a heart-wrenching story with twists and turns along with a tapestry of true chemistry of emotions that will leave the readers thinking and speechless.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poem Summary: Where The Mind Is Without Fear by Rabindranath Tagore

Poem by Rabindranath Tagore: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Short Summary: This poem is written by Rabindranath Tagore during pre-independence days, when India was a colony of the British. The underlying theme of the poem is absolute freedom; the poet wants the citizens of his country to be living in a free state. According to the poem, we see that the poet is expressing his views there should be a country, like where people live without any sort of fear and with pure dignity…they should
67 comments
Read more

Book Review: The Blue Umbrella by Ruskin Bond

Among all Ruskin Bond books, The Blue Umbrella has, so far, gathered immense applaud from readers and critics alike.  This is a short novel, but the kind of moral lessons it teaches to us are simply overwhelming. This is a story of Binya, a poor little girl living with her mother and an elder brother, Bijju, in a small hilly village of Garhwal. One day while herding her two cows back home, she stumbles upon some city people enjoying the picnic in the valley. She is enthralled to see them well-groomed and rich. She craves to be one like them and among many other things of their, a blue frilly umbrella catches her attention. She begins craving for it. On the other hand, the city people get attracted by her innocent beauty and the pendant in her neck. The pendant consists of leopard’s claw – which is considered a mascot widely in the hills. Binya trades her pendant off with the blue umbrella. The blue umbrella is so much beautiful that soon it becomes a topic of conversation fo
63 comments
Read more

Poem Summary: Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias is a short poem of fourteen lines written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The concurrent theme of the poem is that nothing remains intact and same forever in this world. Even the brightest of metal, one day decays with passage of time. The throne name of Egyptian King Ramesses is Ozymandias. It was his dearest desire to preserve himself forever by building a huge statue that he thought would never tumble down. Stanza 1: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; Summary: The poet narrates the poem through the eyes of a traveler who seems to have come back from a remote and far-away land, referring to Egypt. The traveler r
23 comments
Read more