Hosseini is particularly interested in puzzling out the ways in which more privileged people decide what they can and can't do for those who live in misery. He was a physician before he published his first novel, The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini was born in Afghanistan and moved to the U.S. The life paths of Pari and Abdullah and a third half-brother, Iqbal, are strikingly different, in ways that underscore not just the randomness of fate but its deep unfairness in a world in which the powerless suffer exponentially more than members of the more fortunate classes. But most of the story lines hurtle forward in the aftermath of the family's rupture. Some of them begin earlier, with the death of the children's mother after giving birth to Pari, and their father's subsequent marriage to a woman with her own load of guilt over family betrayal. Hosseini shows us all the stories that connect to this act like spokes on a wheel. Ten-year-old Abdullah stays in their father's small village in Afghanistan, while 3-year-old Pari is adopted by a wealthy couple and eventually taken by her half-French mother, a poet, to live in Paris. If at times some threads of the story don't quite match the heft of the rest, the effect of the whole is both unsettling and moving, right from that opening: The father who tells the tale of the giant is about to give up one of his own children, a boy and girl who have been inseparable since the death of their mother. To what lengths should parents go to protect their children from a life of suffering? Is being torn from one's family a better fate than grinding poverty? What acts of mercy do the fortunate owe the less so?Īnd the Mountains Echoed is Hosseini's most ambitious work yet, its multifaceted story more globe-trotting than his best-selling first two novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, and perhaps even more emotionally resonant. It's a devastatingly simple story, but it captures the essence of the complex moral equations that Hosseini spends the rest of the novel teasing out. As a gesture of kindness, the giant gives the farmer a potion that makes him forget he ever had this son.
The farmer, unable to summon the will to take the child from this place of plenty back to his own arid, desperate land, leaves without him. Eventually, the farmer, half mad with grief, tracks down the giant and finds his son in a lush garden full of happy children, with no memory of his birth family. He and his wife decide to choose randomly, and the unlucky one happens to be their favorite son. Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed begins with a fable that a father tells his two children: A farmer who works hard to eke out a living for his family is forced to give up one of his five children to an evil giant.
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