This hectic emotional melange is handled with surprising dexterity. With her driver, Nabi, Saboor's brother-in-law, acting as a go-between, Nila unravels Saboor's family and then her own, absconding to Paris with the little girl when her husband (a closeted gay man) suffers a debilitating stroke. Nila, a wealthy, Westernized poet from Kabul rendered sterile by a botched abortion, offers to become Saboor's patroness in exchange for his young daughter, setting off a chain of events that reshapes the lives of everyone involved. It begins in a rural Afghan village in 1952 with a terrible choice: An impoverished laborer named Saboor ("patient" in Arabic and Pashto) must give up one of his children or watch the rest starve. "And the Mountains Echoed" is Hosseini's most ambitious work, spanning multiple generations and continents. Yet he has attracted legions of fans more accustomed to the "bored, tired people having sex" school of literary fiction, suggesting that we are living in a time when such distinctions are increasingly meaningless, and cynicism is finally going out of style. While Hosseini writes in English - his third language - his profuse employment of tragedy, unlikely reunions and minor acts of God makes his work more readily identifiable within the South Asian literary tradition.
However, the enormous popularity of Afghan American author Khaled Hosseini's novels hints at the advent of a new, more global, less culturally compartmentalized era of literature. For a joke, it was a surprisingly functional yardstick shorthand for the opaque cynicism of the postmodern novel, so very different from the urgently political, emotionally riotous books coming out of the Middle East and South Asia. The response was so immediate, delivered with such deadpan frankness - as if the answer should have been obvious - that I burst out laughing. It's about bored, tired people having sex," he said. Several years ago, I asked a Pakistani writer of my acquaintance a question: What, in his opinion, makes contemporary Western literature distinctive? "Simple.
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