When I first received the copy of ‘And the Mountains Echoed’, I immediately judged it by its cover. Lurid colours, floating feathers, shadows and mountains… dripping with treacly sadness and relentless drama. But then as a reviewer, who wants to (not sure whether should) be taken seriously, I banished such thoughts and got to the job. And then again, it’s hard to recall the last book cover that’s been a work of art. No wonder The New Yorker documents The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover (July 16th, 2013).
Khaled Hosseini’s third novel begins in the fall of 1952 where a father is narrating an old world story to his son and daughter, Abdullah and Pari. But within a couple of pages, we know that very story will play out in a macabre way in the lives of the brother and sister. They will be separated. They will move to separate continents. Their hearts will ache for each other. But decades later, they will unite but not before galloping through new lands, people, loves and deaths. In case, you think that my language reads like the teasers of Bollywood blockbusters, then you are spot on! That’s what we have on hand here.
Hosseini has produced a 400 page tearjerker and readymade material for a sweeping epic. He has catalogued human emotions with the broadest brushstrokes. Sibling rivalry, unrequited homosexual love, the rebellious half French, half Afghani female poet who drinks and smokes away her life, the stern patriarchs, the migrants pining for home, the clash of cultures and at the centre of it all, the brother pining for her sister and the sister, trying to locate what exactly she misses because she was too young when she was forcefully separated from her brother. Hosseini writes about Pari, “That there was in her life the absence of something, or someone, fundamental to her own existence. Sometimes it was vague, like a message sent across shadowy byways and vast distances, a weak signal on a radio dial, remote, warbled. Other times it felt so clear, this absence, so intimately close it made her heart lurch.”
Dear reader, how many Hindi films have you seen where the mother pines for her long lost son (think of how Jaya Bachchan can use some ultra sound to detect her son’s footsteps from far away in that film about loving your parents)? Now, all this might seem too distastefully massy given that we are living in the times of successfully meaningful films! Like the ones about Right wing sperm donors, masculine gay stalkers, the charming lovers who threaten to slit wrists to force-win the undying love of the educated girls… Hosseini has a successful concoction for that too! There’s cross cultural romance, a bit of Afghani history in which a page is all that requires to talk about the Kings, the Soviets and the Taliban, there are exotic islands and each character suffers and only suffers and suffers some more! So there…! A multiplex hit with the potential to make a hundred crores.
Pre ‘And the Mountains Echoed’, Hosseini, for me, was an incredibly good looking doctor who wrote incredibly sad books. The Kite Runner, his first book was also sad and melodramatic. But what worked for the book was the genuineness of the characters’ emotions in which the reader could still feel a certain investment. And the fact that there was a degree of engagement with the sociopolitical history of the characters. But here’s a text that is peopled with scores of characters like specimens of flora and fauna kept in jars in biology labs. Just count the labels: doting brother, closeted Afghan, the Western saviour… There was one character which still promised some depth on the shade card. The poet, Nina Wahdati. But as the novel progresses, hopes are dashed. What you get is the femme fatale who you have seen in hundreds of noir films, the seductive woman with a mysterious past, who appears morally dubious but is caught in a trap from which there is no escape but death.
In an interview with a French magazine, Nina assesses her own poems, “Rather melodramatic and histrionic as well, I fear. Caged birds and shackled lovers, that sort of thing. I am not proud of them.” An epiphanic moment for Hosseini, was it?
