Authors and After Words

It has been observed that lately I’ve been writing a lot about books for younger readers. This is the result of writing about crossovers and the moving border between adult fiction and children’s fiction. Well, all right, but it’s not as though I will stop writing about books for young readers – I think that parents and grand parents want to know what their kids are reading. I do promise, however, to write more about books written for grownups.

So, where to begin?

Eureka!

With book clubs!

Which leads us to two of the most successful books of the new millennium so that we may write this in honor of the many book club readers who played a key role in their success. The author in focus:  Khaled Hosseini; hardly a household name, success notwithstanding. The books:  The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns – the first novels ever written in English about Afghanistan.

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul on March 4, 1965. His father was an Afghan diplomat and in 1970, the family went to Tehran, Iran where his father was stationed. They returned to Kabul in 1973 and Khaled’s younger brother was born there in July. The family remained in Kabul until 1976 when the father was sent to Paris. Khaled was 11 years old when the family moved to the City of Lights. Two years later, in 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (read Communist Party) came into power through a bloody coup and eventually established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The Hosseini family, however, remained in Paris until 1980 when they secured political asylum in the United States. They settled in Fremont, California. Eight years later, Khaled received his bachelor’s degree in biology, then entered the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, completing his M.D. in 1993. He went on to complete his residency in internal medicine in 1996. During these years, he wrote daily, incorporating his childhood experiences in Kabul as elements of a fictional invention, a novel involving friendship, loyalty, betrayal and redemption. That novel, The Kite Runner, was published in 2003 and became a best seller but he continued to practice medicine for a year and a half until he stopped in order to write full time. As a result, his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was published in 2007. Between the two novels, Hosseini has sold more than 10,700,000 books, worldwide. He and his wife and two children continue to live in Northern California, though he travels frequently, speaking out about the fate of the worlds refugees as a Goodwill Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

As one who has read and translated other languages into English, I am always fascinated by writers who find success writing in English as their second language. Joseph Conrad, for instance, born into Polish, learned English at sea, took to the pen when he retired from the Merchant Marine and helped to shape the modern English novel. Isak Dinesen, (i.e. Karen Blixen) wrote both in Danish and English, becoming a great storyteller in both languages. Our own Hanne Gault, here in Door County, like Dinesen, comes into English from Danish and has developed a wonderfully unique voice in the poems she writes in her adopted language. Marcus Zusak’s parents emigrated to Australia to get away from war torn Europe but they continued to speak German in the home so that Zusak’s first language was German. In The Book Thief, Zusak writes in a clean, direct, muscular English that nevertheless breaks forth in lyrical brilliance when the need arises. Just so, the prose of Khaled Hosseini. And like the others mentioned above, this spare yet lyrical language is rooted in the spoken tongue, the seemingly artless line of a fine storyteller.

Back to Hosseini:  critical reaction to Hosseini’s first two novels was generally favorable, but sometimes with the reservation that his plain prose lacks style. I would suggest that his “lack of style” is, in his case, the epitome of style. Moreover, writing as he does about a country whose folk have suffered war for three decades, there is much agony, much suffering, that is best told plainly.

One often hears how Hosseini shows us much about a country of which we know little. But now, as our own sons and daughters are fighting and dying there, we surely ought to learn all we can about Afghanistan. Hosseini’s books have become important in that learning as American soldiers read and learn through him. But more importantly, in telling us what he does about this remote place with its so long suffering people, Hosseini shows us more about ourselves than we may know or want to know but nevertheless ought to know.

With the appearance of A Thousand Splendid Suns, there was much critical discussion about the fact that the first book dealt with boys growing into manhood, while the second dealt with girls and womanhood. The question of which may be the better book almost always followed. As I read them, however, it is hard for me to separate one from the other. I see them as two parts of a single work sharing a structural complicity. In A Thousand Splendid Suns we read of the sacredness of sacrifice and the coming of redemption out of the deep bonding of shared suffering. In The Kite Runner we experience the coming of redemption through an act of making a deep betrayal right again, a reaching down and a reaching out of the lone individual to heal his own broken soul. In both cases, this reaching leads to an embrace that will shelter others as well. The integrity we come to at the end of each of these books, however tentative, brings to mind that great Jewish proverb uttered at the end of “Schindler’s List,” another great story about war and the path of suffering and redemption:  “Save one, you save the world entire.” No wonder the writing of these books has led Hosseini to become a spokesman for refugees.

Hosseini frequently points up the fact that he, like the protagonist in The Kite Runner, always wanted to be a writer. But surely, as a writer looks to tell a story, so a story looks to find its rightful author. Both have found each other in these first novels by Khaled Hosseini.

Speaking of book clubs, let us know who your book club is reading. Send the list of books you have read or intend to read this coming year to me at [email protected] with the words Book Club List on the subject line. We’ll be considering some of those books and their authors in future columns.