Survey of Authors & Secondary Sources
Author: Khaled Hosseini Title: The Kite Runner
What made you interested in this author?
Author Khaled Hosseini captured my interest because of his outstanding success and attention his writing has acquired. In 2003 Hosseini debut his latest accomplishment, “The Kite Runner.” This piece of literature was personally my second novel I have read that was written by Hosseini. Previously I had read his novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns.” A Thousand Splendid Suns was a great story and I enjoyed Hosseini’s style of writing quite a bit which also helped into making a decision to read his other pieces of literature.
Brief background on the author.
Born in Kabul , Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan California
Other Published works and genres.
Khaled Hosseini has only two publications to date being “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns.” In terms of genre, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns are both classified as historical fiction literature. These stories specifically take place in a particular time period in the past with fictional characters. The two stories alike are depicted in real-life locations.
Information on particular places, time periods, events of influence or interest to your author.
Khaled Hosseini as an author upon writing the story The Kite Runner had many personal connections to the story. When writing this story he added several aspects of his personal life to the plot. Khaled did not contrive the story in his mind as it essentially was bits and pieces of his life when he was growing up in Kabul
Themes favored by the author.
Khaled Hosseini is a stupendous author with experiences and morale’s that anyone can relate to one way or another. Khaled presents many themes to the reader for the duration of the novel. The Kite Runner exceptionally portrays the lifestyle and culture of the Afghan people in the story but also in real life. It is striking to see the similarities in his writing as it pertains to a real life situation.
Critic Jim Bartley said “A bullied Afghani boy weeps in a darkened cinema, and is comforted by his best friend--and master--well, I was sold, and hoped only that the book would continue to hold me in the same embrace.” Globe & Mail (Toronto 28 June 2003 ). The theme of friendship and loyalty is expressed initially at the beginning of the story and as the story moves forward these themes become less apparent in the sense that the plot thickens and all of the sudden cause and effect plays a larger role in the story as betrayal becomes apparent.
Other authors compared to…
Khaled Hosseini and Kiran Desai are both unique authors and their stories they write about have a similar feel and plot to them. Khaled and Kiran are comparable in the sense that they both have the same premise behind their stories. The two of them write about characters that are immigrants that have had a difficult upbringing coming from a country of conflict and terror. The stories “The Kite Runner” and “The Inheritance of Loss” comprise of a common political conflict and a difference of ethnicities and beliefs.
Secondary Sources
"Kite Catches and Flies High"
Critic: Jim Bartley
Source: Globe & Mail (Toronto 28 June 2003 ): D3.
[(review date
There has been a next-big-thing buzz around this novel [The Kite Runner] for months now. Born and raised in Kabul San Francisco
A word about that English: What's most conspicuous on almost every page of this debut is not language, but the shimmer of life. There is no display in Hosseini's writing, only expression--a lesson for all budding novelists. By page seven, as a bullied Afghani boy weeps in a darkened cinema, and is comforted by his best friend--and master--well, I was sold, and hoped only that the book would continue to hold me in the same embrace.
And embrace it does--or better said, encompass. Hosseini does tenderness and terror, California Kabul
In San Francisco Pakistan Golden Gate Park
Hassan is the kite runner of the book's title and a former servant to the young Amir, raised in an affluent suburb of Kabul
With keen memory for the raw emotions of childhood, Hosseini introduces us to a culture where a first cousin is a natural choice for a spouse, where an adulterous wife is a greater tragedy than a dead one, and where a horseman trampled to death at a sporting event is simply an ordinary sacrifice to the spectacle. Young Amir earns only speechless disgust from his father, his "Baba", for crying all the way home after witnessing such a death at the local stadium. It's Rahim Khan, Baba's business partner, whose affection for the boy becomes the more valued paternal influence.
At the climax of an annual ritual of battling kites, Amir's win is clinched by Hassan's devotion to him as his kite runner--a boy charged with tracking and intercepting the opponent's damaged kite as it drifts over the city and finally to earth. Hassan succeeds in gaining the prize and, as Amir catches up with him, he finds his friend cornered in an alley by neighbourhood bullies. Quaking with shame and fear, Amir hides and does nothing while Hassan is held face down and the ringleader prepares to rape him. Before he can witness the assault, Amir bolts. "I ran because I ran because I was a coward ... I actually aspired to cowardice."
After the incident, Hassan shies from contact with Amir, making sure he is out of sight each morning after preparing Amir's breakfast and laying out his ironed clothes. Amir colludes in the dance of avoidance, meanwhile, stewing in his guilt. Desperate to remove the source of pain, he plants some of his birthday cash under Hassan's mattress, then reports it missing to Baba. The lie succeeds in driving Hassan and Ali from their lives.
This outline doesn't come close to capturing the book's emotional parsing of the love that's possible between childhood friends. These boys' hearts are already fatally infected by the world's divisions. Hassan can't help but love and serve; Amir can't help but love and use, and his suppressed chafing at the inequity breeds guilt that plays out as abuse--initially petty, finally unconscionable. Callow heartbreak is sustained here through paragraphs and whole pages.
By 1981, the Soviets have occupied Kabul
The tale of fractured childhood grows to include two continents and more than two decades of Afghan turmoil. The shocks and suspense are frequently gripping; meanwhile, Hosseini deftly manages his intimate narrative of love, betrayal and reconciliation. A few plot elements are buttoned down too explicitly (and implausibly) for the sake of an easy tug on the heartstrings. Some readers will revel in this; others may wish their imaginations had been given more credit. Still, Hosseini's catharsis arrives with true force, and a gratifying acknowledgment of life's reluctance to offer storybook endings.
Biographical/Critical Introduction to Khaled Hosseini
Source: Jim Bartley, "Kite Catches and Flies High." Globe & Mail (Toronto 28 June 2003 ): D3.
Gale Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
Biographical/Critical Introduction to Khaled Hosseini
Source: Jim Bartley, "Kite Catches and Flies High." Globe & Mail (
Gale Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
_________________________________________________________________________
Full Text :
COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Oklahoma
Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner. New York
THE KITE RUNNER is Khaled Hosseini's best-selling first novel. It is the very first novel in English by an Afghan, in which a thirty-eight-year-old writer named Amir recounts the odyssey of his life from Kabul San Francisco Peshwar , Pakistan Kabul Afghanistan Pakistan America United States San Jose
For fifteen years the young couple tries in vain to have children. Then Amir receives a call from Rahim Khan, a friend and former business partner of his now-deceased father. Amir flies to Peshwar to meet with him. Rahim Khan reveals that Hassan, Amir's childhood friend, the presumed son of the family servant All, was in reality Amir's half-brother, his father's illegitimate son with Ali's wife. Hassan and his wife were killed by the Taliban. Rahim Khan wants Amir to go to Kabul Kabul America
This lucidly written and often touching novel gives a vivid picture of not only the Russian atrocities but also those of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. It is rightly a "soaring debut," as the Boston Globe claims, but only if we consider it a novel of sin and redemption, a son trying to redeem his father's sin. As far as the Afghan conflict is concerned, we get a selective, simplistic, even simple-minded picture. Hosseini tells us, for example, that "Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis" were behind the Taliban. He does not mention the CIA or Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to President Carter, "whose stated aim," according to Pankaj Mishra in the spring 2002 issue of Granta, "was to 'sow shit in the Soviet backyard.'"
Hosseni also intimates that the current leader handpicked by foreign powers, Hamid Karzai--whose "caracul hat and green chapan became famous"--will put Afghanistan Afghanistan
Ronny Noor
Named Works: The Kite Runner (Book) Book reviews
Source Citation
Noor, Ronny. "Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner." World Literature Today 78.3-4 (2004): 148. General OneFile. Web. 26 Feb. 2011 .
Gale Document Number:A122924631
World Literature Today 78.3-4 (Sept-Dec 2004)
Article #3
"An Old, Familiar Face: Writer Khaled Hosseini, Lifting the Veil on Afghanistan"
- Critics: Khaled Hosseini and Tamara Jones
- Source: Washington Post (28 May 2007): C1.
- Critics: Khaled Hosseini and Tamara Jones
- Source: Washington Post (28 May 2007): C1.
[(interview date 28 May 2007) In the following interview, Hosseini describes his 2003 visit to war-torn Afghanistan.]
Khaled Hosseini is starving. The fussy little frizzle of lettuce on his plate isn't what he hoped for, not the hearty luncheon salad he had clearly asked for, yet the wildly acclaimed author of The Kite Runner can't bring himself to send it back, make a scene or simply order more food. He eats without complaint, takes only one roll from the basket, thanks the waiter warmly and accepts his fate with the same inscrutable Afghan resignation that makes the characters in his new novel maddening or heroic--and often both.
"Zendagi migzara" is how the 42-year-old Californian would put it in his native Farsi. "Life goes on."
For Hosseini, life doesn't go forward so much as backward, as he continues to explore the psyche of the country he left as a little boy, avoiding three decades of war and mayhem by being the "nauseatingly fortunate" son of a diplomat who was already posted to Paris when the turmoil began. He did not escape Afghanistan so much as abandon it, and he returns there again in A Thousand Splendid Suns to reconcile his childhood's watercolor memories with reality's bloody tableau.
Just before The Kite Runner's release in 2003, Hosseini returned to Afghanistan for the first time. Those two weeks would provide much of the material for A Thousand Splendid Suns, with Hosseini on a novelist's deeply personal fact-finding mission.
"To my knowledge, everything I wrote was based on something I saw or heard," Hosseini says. The dismal conditions at a Kabul hospital, for example, came straight from Hosseini's own visit to a surgical ward, where he encountered a family whose small son was having an operation.
"The neurosurgeon came out, and he has this handful of prescriptions he's trying to give the father. He's telling him, 'We don't have serum'--which is what you use for IVs--'we don't have calcium, we don't have antibiotics.'" Hosseini, who spent a few ambivalent years practicing medicine before writing his first novel, immediately understood what the illiterate villager did not: The only chance the child had of getting any of the medicines he needed was if his family found them for him. Hosseini took the prescriptions himself and embarked on a scavenger hunt across the city, from pharmacy to pharmacy, until all were filled.
Likewise, the horror stories he heard about the Soviet invasion, mujaheddin, Taliban rule and all manner of war atrocities made their way into the novel centering around the lives of two Afghan women, Laila and Mariam.
"I think all writers are unapologizing thieves," Hosseini admits with the same self-effacing humor that had charmed the audience at a Smithsonian lecture the night before. He doesn't boast about the 4 million copies of The Kite Runnerpublished in 34 countries, recounting, instead, how "there were days when I couldn't pay people to read that novel."
"I went to an appearance at one bookstore, and the person who organized it wasn't there," Hosseini recalls. He was greeted by a kid with purple hair who didn't know who he was. Hosseini explained that he was the guest author, and soon found himself facing "like, 80 empty chairs and three people. One was a little old lady who must have been 92, and the other was a couple in their 60s." Hosseini suggested they all save face, and offered to just sign books and chat. The trio insisted on the promised reading. Hosseini obliged.
"Then, as I'm reading, I hear this click-click-click noise, and the little old lady is making her way past the podium on her walker."
Now, launching an ambitious seven-week publicity tour across the country for A Thousand Splendid Suns, with a six-nation European swing planned for the fall, Hosseini seems safely past such indignities, his following so assured that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees recently named him a special envoy. Hosseini traveled to Chad earlier this year to visit two teeming refugee camps. And, as had been the case in Afghanistan, he found himself drawn again most deeply into the plight of women.
"There's a tremendous shortage of funds for the victims of Darfur," Hosseini says. "One of the biggest problems at the camps is when the women go out to gather firewood to cook, and they get attacked and raped." A German inventor has built a mini-oven that requires only 20 percent of the current amount of wood, Hosseini notes, and "it only costs around $70." But there aren't funds to buy enough of them, he adds, and women and girls end up brutally beaten and dead as a result. It's a fate that can be changed, the novelist points out.
Hosseini hasn't launched another novel yet, and isn't sure where his next book might take him, but the plight of refugees is clearly a tragedy that has stirred something deep within. He hopes to arrange a trip to Pakistan's volatile refugee camps--home to thousands of displaced Afghans--during his U.N. stint.
"I'm interested in writing about characters who suffer terrible things to survive," he says. He's equally interested in antagonists who do horrible things, then try to atone in ways that are as flawed as their characters. It's not the poetry of epic anguish that Hosseini taps into, but the passion.
"I have always known that my prose is limited," he says mildly. "My writing is spare, direct. My natural knack is for telling a story."
The eldest of four brothers and one sister, Hosseini spent only eight years of his early childhood in Afghanistan, his memories a vivid montage of family picnics, flying kites and Kabul as a peaceful, vibrant city. By the time the Hosseinis became political asylum-seekers in the United States, Khaled was 15 and Afghanistan was a distant, troubled land. His sense of duality was so complete by the time he was in medical school that he was stunned when a classmate referred to the desks where he sat with some Iranian friends as "the terrorist corner."
"And that was 1989, 1990!" he adds.
Hosseini had always harbored dreams of writing, from the plays he cajoled his younger brothers and cousins into performing as a child to the short stories he wrote as an adult. But he was a good student, interested in science as well as literature, and medicine seemed like a more reliable livelihood. He worked onThe Kite Runner early each morning before reporting to work as a primary-care doctor for a large HMO in the Bay Area. "In primary care, you hardly ever save a life," he observes. "The rewards are smaller and more incremental." Medicine was like an arranged marriage he grew fond of; writing was the grand romance between high school sweethearts.
He is routinely asked about the perceived overlap between his two careers, the similarities between writing and medicine. He dutifully replies that they're alike, how both require people skills. Challenge him over a plate of lettuce, though, and he quickly admits that this is a lie. "I answer that way because people expect it." In fact, "writing was always kind of a diversion from medicine." The phenomenal success of The Kite Runner made clear that Hosseini's fate was to explore life's scars, not quickly suture the surface wounds.
When the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, happened, Hosseini was two-thirds through writing The Kite Runner. He remembers telling Roya, his Bethesda-born wife, "You know, I don't want to finish this novel. The Afghans are the bad guys now." Why would any American readers feel any empathy now for this tortured country or its people? Roya, a lawyer, "started making her case," he recalls, and ultimately convinced him that his book "could maybe show a different face of Afghanistan."
That face, in his new novel, is mostly hidden behind the stifling veils of the burqa, which both Laila and Mariam are forced to wear by Rasheed, the abusive husband they share. Hosseini's portrayal of the women gradually coming to not only accept but appreciate the confining garment is already stirring the most criticism of the book, the author acknowledges.
At the Smithsonian, Hosseini took care to deflect any such brickbats before they started flying, insisting that, "personally, I find the idea of making a woman faceless reprehensible. I wish every single woman in Afghanistan could lift the burqa and walk the streets freely."
But the choice should also be theirs to wear it, he told the murmuring crowd.
"Women wore the burqa in Afghanistan for centuries before the Taliban," he went on. "It's not quite the concern for women in Afghanistan as it is for us in the West. It's not as urgent a matter as security, as food, as being able to get medical care for their kids. I'm just not sure what a reliable gauge of women's liberation in Afghanistan the burqa is."
Oppression becomes almost ritualistic in A Thousand Splendid Suns, cruelty heaped upon cruelty, despair buried beneath despair. Even though Afghanistan's reality seems to render melodrama virtually impossible, Hosseini reluctantly admits that he spared readers the worst of what he saw that spring he returned.
"Some things I saw in Kabul I'd rather not talk about," he says. "Some things were just so cartoonishly heinous as to defy all comprehension." He refuses to elaborate.
He wants to go back again someday, and hopes there might come a time when it will even be safe enough to take his two young children, to show them where he came from, to show them where he came from, to scavenge for them memory's bits of beauty still hidden in the ruins.
Biographical/Critical Introduction to Khaled Hosseini
Source: Khaled Hosseini and Tamara Jones, "An Old, Familiar Face: Writer Khaled Hosseini, Lifting the Veil on Afghanistan." Washington Post (28 May 2007): C1.
Gale Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
Biographical/Critical Introduction to Khaled Hosseini
Source: Khaled Hosseini and Tamara Jones, "An Old, Familiar Face: Writer Khaled Hosseini, Lifting the Veil on Afghanistan." Washington Post (28 May 2007): C1.
Gale Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
No comments:
Post a Comment