Kite Runner takes flight Khaled Hosseini’s breakthrough novel BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

California physician and author Khaled Hosseini, son of a diplomat whose family was granted political asylum from Afghanistan in 1980, experienced first-hand the different ways in which outside events and internal decisions can shape a life. His country’s political upheaval landed him here and his first-generation immigrant status propelled him toward the pragmatic path of becoming a doctor, but his childhood love of writing and telling stories never left him. Once he finished his residency and settled into a practice, his search for a creative outlet was no farther away than his word-processor.

What began as a short story in ’99 in response to a news story Hosseini heard about the Taliban banning kite-fighting in his homeland evolved into his acclaimed first novel, The Kite Runner. This 2003 publication was chosen for the 2005 Reading Across Rhode Island project, which the Rhode Island Center For the Book kicked off in January and which will wrap up at the third annual May Breakfast at Rhodes-On-the-Pawtuxet on May 7, with Hosseini as the keynote speaker.

The Kite Runner is a picaresque tale of a son trying to win his widowed father’s favor; of two motherless young boys, bosom pals from birth, whose friendship is torn asunder by fear and betrayal; of a perilous flight into exile and the assimilation into a new country; of a grown man returning to his homeland, seeking redemption and forgiveness. Hosseini’s language is as lyrical as the Persian folktales his young protagonist Amir reads to his friend Hassan; the twists and spirals of the characters’ interactions are as startling as the recent history of Afghanistan itself.

"I wrote this because I was enamored by the relationship between the boys," Hosseini explained, on the phone from his home in northern California. "Then I realized that I wasn’t telling just the story of this boy and his servant, but I was also writing, a little bit, the story of what’s happened in Afghanistan. It became a behind-the-scenes look, so that people get a feel of the place Afghanistan was and how people lived and their customs and how they married and died.

"My initial and ultimate purpose is to tell a story," he continued, "and I want people to enjoy it purely as a story. But also as an Afghan, I certainly want people to come away with a sense that Afghans aren’t just people who fought a war against the Soviets and were oppressed by the Taliban and grow poppies. It’s very hard to think of those people as real actual people with aspirations, dreams, fears, and hopes just like mine and those of my neighbors. But that’s what novels can do sometimes."

Indeed, The Kite Runner is a thrilling page-turner, evoking cinematic images of the films both Hosseini and Amir loved (a film of The Kite Runner is in the works). Though it reads at first like a coming-of-age boys-against-bullies yarn, it turns into an international thriller, taking our hero across well-guarded borders to confront the Taliban, risking his life to save another, and struggling against international immigration laws. It is also the story of a boy trying desperately to forge a relationship with his father, something that happens only in the commonality of their exile and in the light of Amir beginning his own family.

"In Aghanistan, your life revolves around family, your extended family, your tribe — that’s the fabric of your life," Hosseini affirmed. "I’m very interested in family stories and how people relate to each other, how generations relate to each other."

And within Hosseini’s family, the Afghan tradition of oral storytelling remained strong, most memorably in the person of his grandmother: "I was raised around that kind of thing, so when I write, it’s just a natural inclination for me to tell a story and for it to take on a kind of folktale quality."

Like Amir, Hosseini wrote stories as a boy, and he includes one in the book, about a man’s tears turning into gold coins. In The Kite Runner, the author lived out many of his childhood memories of growing up in Kabul in the ’70s: the smells of the bazaar, the sounds of the neighborhood, the sight of the kites flying, the privileged lifestyle. He emphasized that the story is fictional, but he added that the passages closest to his own life are the ones after Amir and his father immigrate to the States.

"We came here pretty much empty-handed," Hosseini recalled, "and like him and his father, my family had to make ends meet. My parents took on a bunch of menial jobs before they settled into their current jobs. I remember very vividly working at the flea market with my father. And we were witnessing the arrival of more Afghan families during the early ’80s, so we became part of that community."

Now Hosseini has a family, with a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. He has taken a one-year leave from his medical practice to finish his forthcoming book, Dreaming in Titanic City, set entirely in Afghanistan. In this book, the political developments over the past 30 years are focused sharply through the eyes of two female characters who struggle through the turmoil in their country and in their own families.

Hosseini made a trip back to Kabul in 2003, and he encountered the same kind of "survivor’s guilt" that Amir does in the book, feeling fortunate to have prospered in a new life but guilty at the sight of countrymen and women who have not. When asked about the future of Afghanistan, he replied slowly: "I am cautiously optimistic, but it’s going to take a long time, with the enormous problems of infrastructure. But they did manage to write a constitution and to hold elections and those are very important first steps."

Khaled Hosseini will speak on Saturday, May 7 at 9:30 a.m. at Rhodes-On-the-Pawtuxet in Cranston. Tickets are $20; the deadline for ticket sales is Friday, April 22. Registration forms are available at www.readingacrossri.orgor by calling (401) 455-8134.