![]() ![]() And while Afghanistan’s modern history provides some of the novel’s backdrop, Hosseini focuses primarily on the devilish decisions his characters are forced to make and their far-reaching consequences. Their father, who barely makes ends meet and who has already lost one child to an early death, strikes this Faustian bargain so that “the finger is cut, to save the hand.” But it is a wound that never closes, dogging brother and sister through all the decades that follow. The children listening to the story do not realize that it foreshadows their own immediate fate, and a few days later Pari, the younger sister, is handed over to a wealthy, childless couple in Kabul, where she will eventually forget her village life and her adoring brother Abdullah. The rub is that if the father chooses the second option, he will never see his son again. ![]() The demon tests the father’s love by offering him a choice: to take his son back to their impoverished village and the life of hardship that is sure to follow, or to leave the boy in his care. Instead, the boy is furnished with “the finest food and clothes, with friendship and affection.” He is tutored, wants for nothing and will one day be given the option to leave. ![]() He describes one particularly heartbroken man who eventually goes after the demon and discovers that his son has not met an unhappy end after all. ![]() At the beginning of Khaled Hosseini’s third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, it is 1952 and an Afghan laborer is telling his son and daughter a bedtime story about a demon who steals children. ![]()
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May 2023
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