Did you realize that May is “Short Story Month”?  How appropriate, since most people (especially students and mamas) have so many field trips, projects, and end of year celebrations in May that reading time gets trumped! (Of course, I chose this month to read Gone Girl, which is keeping me up way too late every night.)

I haven’t read many short stories, but I recently read a novel that felt like a short story collection.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini reads like a compilation of intertwined short stories.  Hosseini’s tales span several generations and many countries, including Greece, America, and of course, Afghanistan.  To fully appreciate the tapestry of interwoven plot lines, you must pay attention to names and places.  When you pull everything together, it’s really cool.

What I liked about the book

As with his other famous book The Kite Runner, Hosseini masterfully strings words together to describe several bittersweet truths about life and the human existence.  For example:

The decline of one’s own body is incremental, as nearly imperceptible as it is insidious.  Seeing Thalia white-haired presents jolting evidence of her steady, inevitable march toward old age- and, by association, my own.

What a beautiful way to describe a phenomenon I’ve recently noticed – when I see friends or relatives after a long absence and note the outward signs of their age, I feel older.

Here’s another wonderful passage, one that carries special resonance with me, a “creative”:

I see the creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking.

Hosseini’s ability to capture these kernels of truth always impresses me.

And the Mountains Echoed does not have the stark violence of that pivotal scene in The Kite Runner.  But it isn’t a lighthearted read, either.

What I didn’t like about the book

At first I didn’t enjoy Mountains at all; I described it to friends as “soap operas set in Afghanistan.”  Many of the early stories focus on the ugliest of human tendencies: jealousy, selfishness, manipulation, and distrust.  I was only a third of the way in and had already endured one character pushing her sibling out of a tree (which led to a paralyzing injury) and two assisted suicides.  It got to the point where I reached the middle of a story and thought, how will this one go wrong?

Also, I didn’t get a deep understanding of Afghan culture and history like I did with The Kite Runner.

Two of the later stories end, if not happily, at least with a marginal sense of closure.  I finally found a few characters that I could like and respect.  Yet there is always a haunting sense of something missed, something lacking.

This book is not a “pick me up” kinda read.

Final recommendation

You would probably like And The Mountains Echoed if:

•  you crave beautiful prose and exotic settings
• you aren’t afraid to spend time with the dark side of human nature
• you are willing to pay attention to names, dates and places to discover how the characters’ lives interconnect
• you like novels that experiment with new ways of storytelling

For a more traditional novel, I highly recommend The Kite Runner.  But be warned, a very important scene in the book involves a brutal sexual assault, and this plot point disturbs many readers.

Have you read And the Mountains Echoed?  What did you think?  Can you recommend any short story collections?

FYI, if you’re interested in listening to short stories, my friend Andrea Bagdley has compiled a great list of story telling podcasts at her blog Andrea Reads America.

Thanks for stopping by!

Julia

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