Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini's next book will tackle the refugee crisis. Save FB Tweet More. Khaled Hosseini fuller shot publicity photo c by Elena Seibert. Credit: Elena Seibert. Sea Prayer by Khaled Hosseini. All rights reserved. Close this dialog window View image Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini's next book will tackle the refugee crisis.
So, with this background, suddenly this image came out of the blue, delivered with pristine, perfect clarity. And I was like: who are these people? Where are they going? The answer — a desperate father is on his way to Kabul to sell one of his children — provides the genesis for the novel's many narratives. The agony of the siblings' separation echoes down generations and across continents. Hosseini though, puts it simply: "The book is kind of like a fairytale turned on its head.
You have a very painful rupture at the beginning and then this tearful reconciliation at the end, except the revelations and the reconciliations you're granted aren't the ones you're expecting. Which is how life is, really.
This isn't how the world appeared in Hosseini's fable-like previous books. Their characters are the kind EM Forster might have classified as "flat" rather than "round". The Kite Runner 's Hassan, for example, is, as Hosseini puts it, "a lovely guy and you root for him and you love him but he's not complicated". Everyone in the new novel finds themself morally compromised at some point. The most stark example of that, he says, "is the warlord — this sort of evil benevolent lord. And it's something I've seen in Afghanistan a lot, these charismatic, larger-than-life figures who people are simultaneously afraid of, in admiration of, dependent on.
The central and most resonant line of the novel, though, is spoken not by a person but by a div , a demonic giant of Afghan folklore. When a peasant's beloved son is taken by the creature, he sets out to rescue his child, knowing he will most likely be killed for his audacity.
Instead, the div shows him his son playing happily with other children. The father has to decide whether to leave his boy there — happy and provided for — or to take him back to a harrowing and potentially short life in a village blighted by droughts. Despondent, he accuses the div of cruelty. It replies: "When you have lived as long as I have, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.
Hosseini is 48 — not exactly Methuselan then, but old enough to look back on his first two novels and see a different writer: a writer for whom cruelty and benevolence were very much two different colours. But if I were given a red pen now and I went back … I'd take that thing apart.
He was similarly exacting with this novel's ending. It ends with an act of mercy: the div gives the man a potion that erases his memory, and with it, the pain of having lost his son.
It's this amazing gift — to treasure all those things that matter to us the most, that form our identity. But it's also very cruel because we relive those parts of our lives that are so painful. I could see that if the reunion were to occur, it would occur on these terms and it wouldn't be the reunion we'd expect and perhaps the one we want.
Among Hosseini's most compelling creations in the new novel is Nila Wahdati, an alcoholic poet. Hosseini was born in Kabul in , the first child of his diplomat father and teacher mother.
Nila came, he says, from the kind of parties he remembers his parents throwing while he was a teenager in the 70s, when a certain stratum of Kabul's middle class was undergoing Westernisation. Drinking freely, smoking. Nila is a creation from my memory of that kind of woman from that time and that place. It was, however, a place that he left when he was just 11 years old.
His father's work took them to Paris, and then, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prevented them from returning home, they sought political asylum in the United States and settled in California.
Hosseini, aged 15, was plunged into a San Jose high school, speaking no English. I think it was a lot worse for my parents. My dad was a diplomat and my mum vice-principal of a high school and now she's a waitress at Denny's, working the graveyard shift, and my dad is a driving instructor.
He adds: "There's nothing wrong with those things, but it was a regauging of their place in life. In Kabul they knew everybody, but in California nobody cared.
The family lived on welfare and, determined to ensure financial security, Hosseini resolved to become a doctor. He graduated from the University of California in and then completed his residency in internal medicine at Los Angeles's Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in One of the new novel's most powerful sections includes an Afghan-American doctor whose compassion is tested by a trip to his homeland.
Hosseini, who says he doesn't miss medicine one bit, admits that the character is deeply autobiographical. I don't want to act the ugly, entitled Afghan-American and go around backslapping people, pretending I'm one of them, full of bonhomie.
0コメント