And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini was the plenary speaker at a conference I attended this past weekend. That sentence does not convey how excited I was to hear him speak about his latest book, And the Mountains Echoed, which I happened to be reading over the weekend. (I've been on the library's waiting list for months. It really was pure coincidence.)

He opened his talk by describing the plot in a single sentence: "the course of a life is altered and there are so many unforeseen consequences." It goes without saying, I think, that some of the consequences are positive and some are negative. At its heart, And the Mountains Echoed is the story of the separation of two siblings and the ways in which their lives diverge from the point of that separation. It is told in so many rich voices, not only of the siblings, but of so many other individuals whose paths they cross and whose lives are impacted, directly and indirectly and in ways both large and small. Speaking of his characters, Hosseini told his audience "I derived a lot of satisfaction and pleasure from creating these characters" and his love for them, even when they are not lovable, comes through in the writing. Yet, if there is a weakness, I would argue that it is the array of characters - that is, I rarely felt that a character's story was as fully fleshed out as I would have liked.

Although the subject matter is heavy - the reader knows from the first pages, if not simply from the name on the cover - that this will be a heartbreaking book at times, it is a pleasure to read. And the Mountains Echoed relies on many modes of storytelling - a fable at the beginning, an interview in a literary magazine, a letter written to a friend - that make for an engaging read. Hosseini said that these devices were partly out of necessity, as a way of spanning decades efficiently, "I had to find ways to advance the story that didn't feel laborious," and as such he labeled some of these devices tricks. Whatever you call them, they are the reader's friend.

Hosseini said that And the Mountains Echoed is the book he is proudest of, that he worked harder on it than on the previous two. I certainly found it the best. As I read, I found myself flipping back, re-reading chapters or pieces of chapters, pausing to think about the characters and, certainly, about chance and choice and the many ways in which the course of a life is altered, one path taken and another forgone, and how the consequences of such divergences cascade down through the decades, gently shaping sop many lives along the way.