The last time Afghan-born American novelist Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner) visited Afghanistan, in 2010, he met two young sisters, both extraordinarily beautiful, living in a remote village north of Kabul. They were part of a family of Afghan refugees, who after being exiled to Pakistan, returned to the desolate, dusty plains of the world’s poorest non-African country. As 5-year-old Saliha protectively held the hand of 3-year-old Reyhan, Hosseini was struck by the sisters’ affection for one another. Before ending his visit, he gave the apple he packed for lunch to Saliha. She immediately handed it to her younger sister.
This gesture, so simple yet demonstrating such devotion, stuck with Hosseini. Though he never planned to base characters off the sisters, a similar bond between siblings can be found in his latest novel, And the Mountains Echoed.
“Their relationship became part of my subconscious,” he said. “It seeped from my subconscious and infiltrated my writing.”
It wasn’t until he was nearly finished with the chapter focused on siblings Abdullah and Pari that he thought, “This reminds me of something I’ve seen in real life.”
Hosseini left Afghanistan when he was just 5. In the last decade, he has returned to visit four times. The first was for personal reasons and the next three were to work with the United Nations Refugee Agency.
His travels formed each of his novels immensely, especially the last two, he said. Meeting and talking to people of all different walks of life, experiencing the struggle of Afghan women, seeing people forcibly uprooted from their homes and separated from their families; Hosseini describes it all as receiving a “hypodermic needle of perspective.”
The reality check hit hardest on his first visit in 2003.
“You land there and immediately think about your life," he said. He witnessed families struggling for a mere glass of water, living on less than $1 a day and fearing they would lose their children to the harsh winter.
“If that doesn’t reset your sense of perspective then nothing will,” he said.
Where his first two novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, were set exclusively in Afghanistan, the new novel has a broadened geographical scope. Though each character is connected to Afghanistan on some degree, their stories take place all over the world. But whether in Kabul, Paris, Greece or California, the characters’ Afghan roots and ties remain central to their lives. Consequentially, Afghanistan functions not only as a setting, but as a character itself.
Readers meet the country around the 1950s in a forgotten time of innocence and peace.
“Then you see it at the end of the spectrum … and you see a very different kind of Afghanistan,” Hosseini said, describing the fictional land of Shadbagh overrun by a drug trafficker/war lord — not unlike many villages that exist in Afghanistan today.
With two New York Times Best Sellers List novels, which combined sold more than $38 million copies, Hosseini is often positioned as an expert on Afghanistan. Many turn to him for answers about the country’s political situation and its future. While, Hosseini comfortably offers his opinions, he makes sure to preface them by explaining that he’s no expert. He says he’s not a historian or an anthropologist and his books are not dissertations — they’re novels. For some, the books serve as windows into the Afghan culture but to really understand the country, one must listen to host a voices and opinions, he said.
Hosseini’s work is generally well received by the Afghan people. There are segments of the Afghan community who are critical, but their criticisms are mostly about cultural matters that “ought not to be aired,” he said. While And the Mountains Echoed deals with topics just as heavy, if not heavier, than the first two novels, it themes focus more on the human soul than on political issues. For this reason, Hosseini believes it will be less divisive than the others.
Afghan people often attend Hosseini’s readings and events to show their support. He feels they may see a sense of their own lives or of people they know in his novels, describing it as a “cathartic element,” especially for the generations who lived in Afghanistan more recently.
Shortly after a visiting Afghanistan in 2007, Hosseini and his wife founded the Khaled Hosseini Foundation which funds projects to benefit Afghan women, children and refugees. Since its establishment, the foundation has funded 359 shelters for more than 2,000 people through its partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shelter program. It has also funded scholarships for young women, literacy programs for adult women, sponsorship of street children to get them into schools, education centers that serve hundreds of children each year, an ultrasound machine for a maternity center, and an early education center to help break the chain of child labor in the handmade-rug industry. One of the foundation’s latest initiatives is a matching gift campaign for the United Nations shelter-building program.
Best selling author Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner) will be at The Tampa Theatre Tuesday, June 18 to sign and discuss his latest novel, And the Mountains Echoed, while WMNF-88.5 FM Radio's Rob Lorei moderates. Book and ticket package is $35, available at Oxford Exchange and Inkwood Books, and includes a copy of the new book and two tickets for the event, as well as an autograph voucher for each book. A portion of the proceeds will go to the Khaled Hosseini Foundation.
