![]() 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. Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965, the first child of his diplomat father and teacher mother. "I just wanted her to be real – full of anger and ambition and insight and frailty and narcissism." "I didn't want her to be likable," he agrees. One chapter takes the form of a Paris Review-style Q&A in which she's simultaneously charming and insufferable. 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."Īmong Hosseini's most compelling creations in the new novel is Nila Wahdati, an alcoholic poet. But it's also very cruel because we relive those parts of our lives that are so painful. It's this amazing gift – to treasure all those things that matter to us the most, that form our identity. "And I was like, ah, this is how the book needs to end, with this idea of memory as a way that we make sense of our life. ![]() 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. "I sort of dreaded this kind of Hollywood-ish thing and I could see it inching that way and was a little worried." Then he reread his first chapter, which includes the story of the div and the peasant father. He was similarly exacting with this novel's ending. But if I were given a red pen now and I went back … I'd take that thing apart." "I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. "Yeah, it looks like the work of somebody younger than me," he says, a little ruefully. 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. It replies: "When you have lived as long as I have, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour." Despondent, he accuses the div of cruelty. 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. Instead, the div shows him his son playing happily with other children. 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. 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. 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 most stark example of that, he says, "is the warlord – this sort of evil benevolent lord. Everyone in the new novel finds themself morally compromised at some point. 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". Their characters are the kind EM Forster might have classified as "flat" rather than "round". This isn't how the world appeared in Hosseini's fable-like previous books. 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. Hosseini though, puts it simply: "The book is kind of like a fairytale turned on its head. The agony of the siblings' separation echoes down generations and across continents. 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. And I was like: who are these people? Where are they going?" So, with this background, suddenly this image came out of the blue, delivered with pristine, perfect clarity. "People are terribly afraid and they lose their kids. "I heard these stories about what a harrowing ordeal wintertime is for families in Afghanistan," he says.
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