![]() In addition to giving the story a depth of dimension, the shifting narrative enables a literary archaeology that is only partly fictional. Begun by Abdullah, it moves to Nabi and through the passage of time to Pari and others, as those young at the novel’s beginning drift into adulthood and, like the reader, assess, the legacies of the past through the eyes of their present. ![]() ![]() Nabi, the step-uncle of little Abdullah, a chauffeur in Kabul, is the intermediary through which this act of estrangement, so central to the tale, is accomplished.Īs in the The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the story’s narrative shifts continually. Abdullah’s life is ravaged by grief a second time, when three years after his mother’s death, their father Saboor gives away the little Pari to be adopted by a wealthy, childless woman in Kabul. Abdullah dotes on Pari, his only full sibling, and through his eyes we see how even the wants and weariness of a meager childhood do not erase its simple and pure joys. The story begins in the 1950s, in a fictional village called Shadbagh, a Farsi word meaning “the happy garden.” The first of the story’s many narrators is a little boy named Abdullah, whose mother died while giving birth to his younger sister Pari. It is that forgotten Afghanistan, buried under layers of war, the Soviet invasion, the Taliban incursion, and the American intrusion, that Hosseini unearths. ![]() ![]() At the same time, without resurrecting the Afghanistan that was, it is not possible to see the true dimensions of the tragedy of what Afghanistan is today. ![]()
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