BONUS: Khaled Hosseini, And The Mountains Echoed

In which I vaguely insinuate I can “do better” than one of the best storytellers on the planet, then promptly explode from hubris.

Today’s Word Count: 1,061

I’m waiting for my American-print copy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to arrive (sue me, I have trouble reading dialogue in international format), and it’s not even April 1st yet so I started this week with a book I’ve had on my iPad for a while now.

General thoughts

And The Mountains Echoed was very different from Hosseini’s other books, in my humble opinion, not just in format but in “oomph.” (And yes, that’s the technical term.)

The Kite Runner brought me to my knees and A Thousand Splendid Suns ruined my junior year of high school (in the best possible way), and while I found And The Mountains Echoed to be a good story, it wasn’t as compelling or as heart-shattering to me as Hosseini’s other books.

That’s not to say it wasn’t powerful or affecting, just that it was a bit of a letdown compared to his other novels.

Let’s talk about that word “novel,” as well.

Mountains wasn’t a novel in the traditional sense, but rather nine short stories featuring loosely interconnected characters. There was a vague plotline tying all of the stories together (the “sale” of a three-year-old girl, Pari, to a wealthy family in Kabul), but some of those ties felt forced or loose.

Weirdly, the two stories I found the most compelling — Parwana’s and Markos’s — seemed like the ones that could have been pulled out of the collection without impacting the overall plot.

Caveat: Chronology is, like, REALLY important

Normally, I’m a fan of this type of story cycle: jumping from one perspective to the next in order to tell a series of stories that branch out from one central tree.

But Mountains lost me somewhere, perhaps because some of the stories were in third person, some in first person, and two told in epistolary format — supposedly in the form of letters, but these were some of the most flowery letters of all time.

(No offense, Mr. Hosseini, it just bothers me when someone puts several paragraphs of poetic scene description in what’s meant to be a letter from someone with no literary training. BUT I know it’s a novel, and that’s why poetic license exists. Also, just the way you talk about trees is enough to make a park ranger drool!)

I’m not sure if this was a choice or a happenstance, but almost every story had something to do with disability, but in a way that sometimes leaned toward tokenism rather than feeling realistic or diverse.

It felt like every story featured someone who was crippled, disfigured, injured, or a burden to someone else — a lot of martyrs, both on the side of the person being cared for and the person acting as caretaker. And not just martyrs, but the type of martyr that wants to tell you constantly how amazing of a person they are and what an incredible sacrifice they’re making in that martyrdom.

And beyond that (or maybe because of it?), there were a lot of convenient “oh, of course” moments and interactions between characters that felt falsified or forced.

Because of this lack of realism (for me, anyway), there were a number of moments where I felt myself “pulled out” of the story.

My main issue was consistency — because the narrative focus jumped around so much, it was hard to come to understand, empathize, and care about all the different characters before their particular arc would be over and we’d be on to the next set of multifaceted characters.

In addition, the stories often jumped around in the timeline, making it difficult to keep track of the chronology between stories (even/especially in the middle of individual stories). I’m a big fan (usually) of books that don’t follow a “Point A to Point B” chronological sequence, but Mountains jumped too much for me to keep it straight.

An important aside: I read this book on my iPad, and I’ve noticed I’ve been having concentration issues when reading on a screen lately, so these complaints could be completely specific to me. At the same time though, I absolutely DEVOURED Liane Moriarty’s Three Wishes in two sittings on my (one) iPad. So, maybe it was this particular book, maybe it was the position of Jupiter, maybe I’m turning into one of those readers, divorced and middle-aged and sunburned on a beach somewhere, who only consumes popular fiction set in Australia. Who knows?

All in all, I enjoyed the book and I’m glad I took the time to read it, but I still feel vaguely unsatisfied now that I’ve finished it.

Perhaps if it was marketed as a story cycle or a collection instead of as a novel, I wouldn’t have this feeling, but I got lost enough times that I still don’t feel like I got what I was “supposed” to get out of that novel.

I don’t feel like I’ll be thinking about it for the next several months the way I did with The Kite Runner and still do, to this day, with A Thousand Splendid Suns.

The important stuff: Are story cycles worth it?

Now that it’s time to talk about me, I do want to mention that I’ve been kicking around the idea of writing a novel in the form of interconnected short stories. For YEARS now, I’ve had a fleshed out fictional city, a bunch of well-rounded (in my opinion, anyway) characters, a very cool dog, and a bunch of other fun factoids in my head but no “plot” to tie them all together.

(I can hear Steve King shrieking in my ear to just put these characters in a room and see what happens, but lemme just say, I’ve tried — and I can only write the same scene at the same gas station so many times before I want to punch someone in the head.)

I’m not trying to insinuate here that I could do a better job with this story structure than Khaled Hosseini. My point is that story cycles like this need a heavy hand with chronology, if we’re supposed to have one thread tying everything together in the way Pari’s story worked as a backdrop for Mountains.

Perhaps there were a few additional Parwana and Markos-style stories that got cut during the editing process that would have wrapped everything in a neat little bow.

As always with Mr. Hosseini, the writing itself was beautiful, decadent; a love letter to San Francisco, Afghanistan, Paris, and Greece. The only reason I got lost was because I had trouble holding every character together in my mind, and lost sight of the tree for all its branches.

Don’t hurt me, hubris gods

I cannot stress this enough — I freaking love Khaled Hosseini. He’s one of the best popular storytellers in the industry today, and both The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns are utter masterpieces.

(In fact, I’d go so far as to say A Thousand Splendid Suns has the best closing line of any novel ever written, and I cry like I’ve just had my heart stepped on every time I read it.)

As I get ready to dive into the meat of this project, I’m glad I have a backdrop of nontraditional novel structures as well as the classics.

Tune in next time when I actually do start crying about Mick Kelly — or if Amazon doesn’t get the book to me when it’s supposed to, maybe I’ll move on to one of the FIVE books that have already arrived on my doorstep!

You’ll just have to find out next time I post :)

Ciao,
Maggie