“And the Mountains Echoed” by Khalid Hosseini
Summary
It is the year 1952 and autumn is coming to a fictional village of Afghanistan called Shadbagh. The prospect is sufficiently miserable. Lacking central heating and adequate food, some small child is liable to perish. One of the villagers, Saboor, tells his children a story to this effect. A monster called a div, with horns and tail and shining red eyes, invades the village one day, according to this story “Families would pray that the div would bypass their home, for they knew that if the div taped on their roof, they would have to give it one child.”
The main thread is the story of Saboor and his descendants, with Abdullah ending up in the United States owning a restaurant called Abe’s Kebab House. This last part of the novel is narrated by Abdullah’s American-born daughter, a familiar type in this sort of literature — the child torn between America and the restrictive culture of her parents. In this case Abdullah insists on his daughter learning Farsi and undergoing instruction in the tenets of Islam, much against her inclination.
Abdullah and his wife can hardly be blamed for this. Back in Afghanistan, even the poorest of villages has a mosque and a mullah (Islamic priest) to impart literacy and the teachings of the Quran. While no one in the novel is at all religious, it is clear that such village institutions supply the sinews and backbone of a culture — a culture almost sufficiently powerful to resist the allure of rap music, Madonna, video games, Indian soap operas and Bollywood.
Meanwhile, Pari is taken to Paris by her adoptive mother, Nila Wahdati, when Nila’s husband becomes an invalid. Nila is half-French and a poet of distinction, so there is no problem assimilating. The problem is Nila’s raging narcissism, an implicit demand that her daughter fill in the empty spaces of her soul.
In this portion of the novel, particularly, there seems to be ambivalence about the uses of art. Paris being Paris, and France being France, there is no shortage of art anywhere — Pari’s own daughter is a musical composer and her son-in-law a chef. This is good. But no amount of art seems to outweigh Nila’s oppressive treatment of her daughter. A similar monster of egotism, a woman named Madeline, makes a name for herself in the field of acting — an artistic discipline that seems to intensify, if anything, self-centeredness.
A parallel situation is medicine. One doctor in the novel, from a prominent Afghan family but now living in the United States, pledges himself to help a badly injured child in a Kabul hospital. On returning to America, his adopted country, however, he allows himself to be fatally engulfed by all the demands of his job and his social position. Home renovations, in his case, ultimately take precedence over his good intentions. He never returns to the Kabul hospital. Another doctor, however, devotes half his year to care for the Afghan victims of violence.
The value of science and medicine is not in question. The two doctors are just different breeds.
In similar fashion, Hosseini leaves no doubt that, in his capacity as author, he values all that can be loosely included in the term “art.” It can be life-giving. The lonely gentleman, Nila Wahdati’s husband, who adopts Pari in the early part of the novel, for example, spends his life expressing his hopeless passion for his chauffeur by ceaselessly painting and drawing the man. Another unknown artist is Abdullah’s daughter, who puts aside her great talent in order to care for her parents. Her art is no less important for not being allowed full expression.
Certainly, on a very humble level, activity which can loosely be described as art has a survival value. Saboor’s storytelling, an ancient lullaby that pops up here and there and helps unify the narrative, kite flying, a little girl’s fascination with feathers — beautiful objects that also suggest wings and flight — these are all species of art, or spiritualized reality. A giant oak tree is nature’s art, appropriated by villagers for centuries. Abdullah’s grandfather creates a swing from one of its branches, for the delight of children. It is a terrible blow when the tree is chopped down for firewood.
What makes these considerations vital is the life of the characters, the impression they leave on the reader. To this end Hosseini painstakingly constructs his characters, their clothes, their facial features, their ruminations. Somehow, these descriptions resist engaging the reader, however — in part because whatever narrative momentum they generate is lost whenever the narrative switches to another character and another point of view.
Some intensity of conflict is lacking in the stories, some intensity of desire that lends an almost heroic dimension to a character. Perhaps there is too much reflection on identity, too little raw recapturing of the strains and cultural violence engendered by life in our new global village.