And The Mountains Echoed

There will be spoilers.  I’ll try to keep them vague, but BEWARE.

The box!  I love that the box made a final appearance in And The Mountains Echoed. There was a box at the end of A Thousand Splendid Suns too. Is it a box of tears?  Because that is what Khaled Hoseinni is doing to his readers with them. It's sad that the contents of the box didn’t become a life long passion for Pari, but she can feel that the items are significant. 

Did Pari have a better life because Saboor sold her to the Wadhatis?  She was really for Nila, though Suleiman loved her too.  Nila was so full of lies, it's so sad.  If not for Nabi, Pari would not know the truth.  If Pari had stayed in Afghanistan, she would not have lived so fully. She definitely would not have been a professor.  The fable at the beginning of the book is the whole novel in a nutshell.  I spent a lot of the story waiting for Abdullah and Pari's reunion.  For a while I thought it wasn't going to happen or that one of them would be dead.  I just wished for more for Abdullah.  I like how Pari and Pari ended.

Iqbal, warlords, awful. It makes me so sad to think that people fleeing the war can still lose everything.

I enjoyed Markos and Thalia.  Much of what happened to them mirrored what happened to the Afghanistan family. I think it shows that the ties of family transcend race and culture. But, I also think that their family story could have been its own novel. I would have missed getting to know Thalia here, but I think she and Markos could have carried their own tale.

Is Idris supposed to come off like such a wuss?  His storyline with Timur, Amra and Roshi was fascinating. Roshi was amazing and was almost a different version of Pari.  Does it all boil down to jealously or even more sadly, a weakness of character?  Like the Greek storyline, I did spend some of the time wishing to get back to Pari and Abdullah, but I do think it enriched the novel.

Maybe the Greek and American stories are supposed to give us an idea of a ripple effect. Perhaps it is actually a web and we are all connected by strings, tying us together.  And The Mountains Echoed was an amazingly sad and wonderful tale, crossing cultures and continents.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

This was an incredible novel. I think I might actually be a better person for reading it. It’s finished and I still can’t put the book down. It was utterly fantastic. It almost made me cry and most books don’t do that. The touching way that Khaled Hosseini described the plight of the characters was captivating. It made me feel so angry and sad that people could be treated that way. Not just the women, the two main characters, Laila and Mariam. I was upset at the way men are raised and recruited into these “jihad” forces.

Not only is the book a look at the personal lives of these characters, but it is also an interesting look at the history of Afghanistan told by an Afghan. I could go on about the characters, what happens to them, the invasions, the bombs. I could talk about how each government changes, in the most basic ways, the way women are treated. I could even talk about the outrage at having men Laila considers warlords, become ministers in government. I won’t though. It’ll give away too much about this story and this story you need to read for yourselves. If there is one book that I put on my “must read” list, it’s this one. Everyone should experience A Thousand Splendid Suns.

*On a side note, after The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, he was appointed a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Check out his website for more information on him and the UN site for the current situation in Afghanistan and refugees around the world.
http://www.khaledhosseini.com/
http://www.unhcr.org/