hadn't been in the midst of a war in Afghanistan? But here's a story about family life, about customs, about the drama within this household, a window into a different side of Afghanistan.ĭo you think the book would have gotten the same attention if the U.S. Usually stories about Afghanistan fall into "Taliban and war on terror" or "narcotics" - the same old things. ![]() I was reluctant at first, but eventually I came around to her way of looking at it, which was that this story could show a completely different side of Afghanistan. When 9/11 happened, my wife really started talking to me about submitting a novel. I had always written short stories and I'd written a short story called "Kite Runner" and I went about expanding the short story to a novel. I really meant the book as a challenge to myself to write a novel. The timing wasn't intentional, but it kind of worked out that way. Did you think, "Well, now there's finally an interest in the region" or "Now it's a marketable story"? To what extent was "The Kite Runner" a product of geopolitical timing? That is, just after Afghanistan and Afghans reached the headlines here and showed up on Americans' radar, your book comes out. Salon sat down with Hosseini in San Francisco in October, just before "The Kite Runner" premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Last week, the studio announced that the children and their guardians had been relocated to an unnamed city in the United Arab Emirates, clearing the way for the film's release this Friday. disaster for Paramount, which agreed to delay the film's release until the kids were safely out of Afghanistan. (Mahmidzada's parents said they had no knowledge of this plot point when they agreed to let their son act in the movie.) Word of the rape scene has triggered threats of violence against the three Afghan child actors who appear in the film, demands that the scene be cut, articles about Hollywood exploitation - and an ensuing P.R. Now, as he anticipates the premiere of the movie version of "The Kite Runner," the 42-year-old author, who no longer practices medicine and whose second novel, "A Thousand Splendid Suns," was published in May, talks about Americans' positive response to his book and some Afghans' outrage at the movie, which includes a 30-second scene depicting the rape of a boy, played by a 12-year-old Afghan, Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada. It's a winning recipe for book club consumption - and film adaptation. Beautifully written, startling and heart wrenching, "The Kite Runner" is also an episodic page turner. While Hosseini drew much of the book - its cultural richness, accounts of ethnic conflicts, even its evocation of annual children's kite contests - from his own experience, Amir's harrowing story is fiction. It wasn't until 2003, with his book in production, that the author returned to Afghanistan to visit the land of his birth and retrace his character's footsteps. In 1980, he and his family were granted political asylum in the United States and moved to San Jose, where he still lives with his wife and two children. Like Amir, Hosseini grew up in an affluent household in Kabul in the 1970s, though the author also spent part of his childhood in Tehran, Iran, and Paris. ![]() It is a relationship that haunts Amir from Kabul to California, where Amir and his father move after the Soviets invade Afghanistan. Amir's close but ambivalent friendship with - and lifelong shame regarding - his Hazara servant Hassan is at the heart of the book. The first novel published in English by an author from Afghanistan, "The Kite Runner" is the story of Amir, the young son of a well-to-do Afghan diplomat in 1970s Kabul. The book has served to bridge the cultural divide and surmount headlines with its story of a young boy contending with political and personal turmoil. ![]() "The Kite Runner," which became an international bestseller - translated into 40 languages, it has sold 8 million copies worldwide - helped fill in that very rudimentary picture. To a great extent, Americans had pictured Afghanistan as a land of cave-dwelling terrorists. It was the year many Americans first learned where Kabul, the country's capital, was and who the Taliban were. The times were cataclysmic, but for Hosseini, a practicing physician with an unpublished manuscript, the timing was propitious. Six months into his work on the book, the events of 9/11 occurred. In March 2001, Khaled Hosseini started writing "The Kite Runner," his semiautobiographical saga about coming of age in Afghanistan and coming to America after the Soviet invasion - and returning to Afghanistan after the rise of the Taliban.
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