“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us,” (110). Khaled Hosseni’s “And the Mountains Echoed” is a web that links together a dispersed family and shows how if one thread is removed the chain is entirely changed. Hosseini takes care to connect each of them, in roundabout ways, by tracing the paths of many characters from their birthplaces to where their lives will finish. A major theme that runs through Hosseini’s work is a sense of disconnect from one’s past in the wake of great change. More specifically, his characters often experience one event that acts as a fateful turning point and echoes through the rest of their life. He seems fascinated with the concept that a single event can shape the person we become, changing us irreversible. Hosseini begins the novel with a simple fairy tale to help condole the guilt that is to come. In 1952, in a remote Afghan village called Shadbagh, a penniless laborer is compelled to sell his three-year-old daughter to a wealthy childless couple in Kabul in order to sustain his wife and remaining children. The forced separation inflicted on all of the family members will come back around periodically throughout each of …show more content…
In his adolescence he befriended Thalia, a girl disfigured after being bitten by a dog. This part of the novel unfolds on the Greek island of Tinos, where Thalia is abandoned her mother and is left to live with her childhood best friend, Odelia Varvaris. Thalia severs as Mr. Markos inspiration to choose to be a plastic surgeon and make his way to Afghanistan to help other children who are hurt because of the affects of the war. This chapter does seem to be an outlier in comparison to the rest but really Mr. Markos reconnects Pari with her former life, bringing the book back to it is end- Pari and Abdullah meet