And the Mountains Echoed in Around the World

Jul 15, 2019 Ankit Agrawal rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, asia, armchair-travels-2019-challenge

Disappointingly Repetitive

Khaled Hosseini is a master story-teller. He can weave magic with his words, gnawing at them and seducing you into his book. But the problem is his writing style and theme is very repetitive. If you have already read The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns then you won't find anything different in this book.

The writing style (even though as mentioned above is great) is very mechanical. Hosseini uses a fixed set of words and in all his books. He uses a lot of met

Disappointingly Repetitive

Khaled Hosseini is a master story-teller. He can weave magic with his words, gnawing at them and seducing you into his book. But the problem is his writing style and theme is very repetitive. If you have already read The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns then you won't find anything different in this book.

The writing style (even though as mentioned above is great) is very mechanical. Hosseini uses a fixed set of words and in all his books. He uses a lot of metaphors too, which can be good but an over-dosage can sound too melodramatic and take away the joy of reading. As with his other books the backdrop and theme of this book is same too. The story starts just before the wartime Afghanistan, the invasions happen, the loved one's (either family or friends) are thrown apart and after many many years they are somehow reunited. All of Hosseini's works surround around this theme and backdrop, only the stories and characters are different. The message and the feeling these books give are the same as well.

Both of Jeffrey Archer and Khaled Hosseini used to be my favourite writers until I had read only a couple of their works. But soon as I read further of their works my respect and admiration for them has lessened. Dan Brown is another similar repetitive writer, although he was never amongst my favourite. The reason is simple, although all of them can write a great story, they write about fishes of the same small pond. Just that the fish in every story is different. With Jeffrey Archer distanced at birth siblings and their rivalry, with Dan Brown it's one day code breaking thriller and with Hosseini it's wartime Afghanistan and the separation and unity leading to it. Read any two of their works and you've read them all

According to me, the truly great writers are the one's who can write stories on different themes even though the genre is same. Hosseini can't or so far at least hasn't written anything to suggest that he can write something different yet equally good and so be considered amongst the greatest writers of the modern day or all time. His horizon is very short and he doesn't know anything beyond it.

If you want to read Hosseini then read The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splending Suns and I would say stop there. Those are really master pieces of Afghan Historical Fiction and story-telling.

I can't end this review with just criticizing Hosseini though. The good part I liked about this book was that it was narrated from the point of view of 4-5 different people all of whom lived different lives but shared a connection. All of them are Afghan citizens but all of their lives are affected in different manners due to poverty and war. I particularly liked the stories of Nila Wahdati, Idris and Adel. Pari, Nabi and Abdullah gave me the same mechanical feeling which I had read in other books. ...more

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Jan 03, 2014 The Book rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: asia, afghanistan

This is one of those books I'm not quite sure how I feel about after reading it. I mean, I enjoyed it. Mostly. I liked how the stories were woven together, and the disparate characters touching briefly in the author's web. I didn't get story-satisfaction from it; this was something else, playing with the form of a novel and a story, bending it and making it sort of jagged and like a fragmented mirror. Clever, conceptual, but I personally did not enjoy it. (Also, what happened to Iqbal? Loose end ...more

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