Extract of an interview to Khaled Hosseini

This is an extract of an interview to Khaled Hosseini taken from

http://www.powells.com/authors/khaledhosseini.html

The full text can be read by clicking this link. I chose those points that made more sense considering that we are studying The Kite Runner, and most of them answer those questions we planned on class some weeks ago.

Have fun :)

“That first novel is an immigrant story. Amir and his father come to the States. Their life resembles mine to quite an extent, especially the immigrant experience.”

"Dave: Taking Amir back to the city after many years in America, Farid tells him, "Kabul is not the way you remember it." What is the lasting part of Kabul? What has withstood the shelling and the war?

Hosseini: Not much. When I went back, some of the neighborhoods were almost nonexistent. They were so badly destroyed that you're walking and it's almost like a sand castle, debris and walls and not much else. The better neighborhoods, the so-called more posh neighborhoods, by our standards looked terribly neglected, with huge potholes, broken windows, broken walls.

Some things remain. The school where I went, built by the French in the sixties, was in surprisingly good shape. It had been renovated and restored; it was full of students.

Some of the landmarks in Kabul are still there, but even those — for example, the big pleasure palace-slash-restaurant on top of the hill that overlooks the whole city — those landmarks are still standing but they've been badly damaged. The old palace that the king had built in the 1920s used to be very glamorous, full of splendor. It was supposed to capture some of that European glamour. It looks like a ghost house. It's been blown to pieces, a bunch of pillars. It's very sad.

(…)

Between 1992 and 1996, prior to the rise of the Taliban, the infighting between factions was violent and anarchic. It caused terrible destruction within Kabul and killed seventy thousand people in the city. And it was very confusing: all these different factions, aligned along ethnic lines generally, each with their own warlords-slash-commanders.

And they would shift allegiances. They would sign peace accords and then break them the next day. One would sign with one group for two months, and then they would switch and sign with another group. You never really know who was fighting who. It was confusing. Groups would capture certain parts of the city and then lose them, so one day you were under the authority of one faction and the next you were under the authority of another. It was chaotic.

Dave: It's estimated that seven or eight million people fled the country.

Hosseini: At the height, it was close to eight million. They fled when the Soviets invaded — a lot of the Afghan exiles living in the States came after the Soviet invasion. Then large numbers fled when the Mujahideen began infighting, and of course the Taliban caused another wave.

(…)

Dave: Under the Taliban, a woman's livelihood depended upon how much freedom and respect the man in her house would give. Women had no recourse outside of the home, or outside the marriage.

Hosseini: They share a lot of hardships, Mariam and Laila. Outside the home, on the streets, the Mujahideen are blowing the city to pieces, or the Taliban are hanging people and whipping them and so on. Inside the home, this abusive man, Rasheed, has a lot of scorn for them and is basically an unrepentant misogynist.

(…)

Dave: Did you have a favorite kite growing up?

Hosseini: I didn't have a favorite kite, but I had a favorite kind of kite. My kites never stuck around long enough for me to have a favorite. I wasn't very good.

The kites of Kabul were built for aerodynamic reasons, not aesthetic reasons. They were fighter kites. We flew a particular kind of warrior kite.

Dave: Those scenes in Kite Runner are so evocative. When you describe the competitions, how much is fictionalized? I mean the nature of the competitions, not the experiences of the characters.

Hosseini: A lot of it was taken from memory. Of course you take liberties and elaborate, make it a little grander than the reality, but that was what pre-adolescent and even adolescent boys did in the winter.

There was nothing much to do. We had three months off from school. It snowed everywhere. It was cold. You couldn't go out to the countryside with your family like you did in the summertime. We were trapped in the city with no television, very little radio. You'd already seen the flick down at the theater. Boys get restless. Kites were a great way of letting off steam, socializing.

We spent entire afternoons flying kites. In fact when I think of Kabul in the 1970s, the first thing that comes to mind is the kites.

(…)

Dave: You were a practicing physician. What stirred you to write the book that would become The Kite Runner? Had you been writing all along?

Hosseini: I'd been writing most of my life. I started when I was a kid, writing short stories off and on. I loved it, though I was fairly private about it.

The Kite Runner began in the spring of '99 as one of these What if? short stories. I revisited the story in March of 2001. My wife and my father-in-law somehow had found it and read it. My father-in-law said, "This is a great little story. I wish it had been longer. I wanted to know more."

I went back and reread it, and I recognized how it didn't work as a short story, but I thought maybe there was a book in it. It started that way.

In March of '01, I began writing a novel, expanding the short story, and it took on a life of its own. Before I knew it, I was completely invested in that world and writing that novel.

Dave: How long was it between the time you thought you'd finished the novel and when you sold it?

Hosseini: I sent it to agents in June of 2002. Several weeks of rejections followed, but eventually I found an agent and it was sold within another month or two. I sent it off in June and by September I was talking to my editor.

(…)

Dave: Did any particular mystery or thriller writers make an impression on you as a young reader? I'm thinking of the last quarter of Kite Runner.

Hosseini: Growing up in Afghanistan, I read mostly Persian poetry. I grew up in a pretty literate home, but in Afghanistan there's not much of a novel-writing tradition. I read some novels in Farsi, translations of Western novels, but I didn't really begin reading novels until I came here. Then I read a lot of genre fiction as well as literary.

There's a kind of thriller feel to the very end of Kite Runner, at least in a couple of chapters, but I don't know that they were inspired by anybody.

(…)

Dave: One of the reasons a reader can bear with his [Amir’s] transgressions early in the book is that they're not unrecognizable. They're not crimes against humanity; they're moments of weakness.

Hosseini: They're recognizable flaws, things all of us are capable of doing. I think that's why people like that character — not that they want to have a beer with him or like him as a person, but they like him as a character in a story. He wears his flaws on his sleeve; he's aware of them. He's not aloof to what he is.

All of us have done things we're ashamed of, things we wish we could take back, and all of us have done things we're proud of. He kind of embodies both. I don't think you'd want to read a novel, three or four hundred pages, about some irredeemable jerk.

Dave: (…) Amir spends an awful lot of time cogitating over what he could have done differently in that alley. But these are decisions we all make through the course of our life.

Hosseini: And little do you know that seemingly small decisions can have profound effects. In a way, both novels are about regret and that sense of loss.

(…)"