25/08/2019
Book of the day:
And The Mountains Echoed
by Khaled Hossein
And the Mountains Echoed begins with a fable that a father tells his two children: A farmer who works hard to eke out a living for his family is forced to give up one of his five children to an evil giant. He and his wife decide to choose randomly, and the unlucky one happens to be their favorite son. Eventually, the farmer, half mad with grief, tracks down the giant and finds his son in a lush garden full of happy children, with no memory of his birth family. The farmer, unable to summon the will to take the child from this place of plenty back to his own arid, desperate land, leaves without him. As a gesture of kindness, the giant gives the farmer a potion that makes him forget he ever had this son.
It's a devastatingly simple story, but it captures the essence of the complex moral equations that Hosseini spends the rest of the novel teasing out. To what lengths should parents go to protect their children from a life of suffering? Is being torn from one's family a better fate than grinding poverty? What acts of mercy do the fortunate owe the less so?