E-mail a friendKhaled Hosseini
airdate June 15, 2007
Dr. Khaled Hosseini practiced medicine before giving in to his first love—writing. As a 4th grader in his native Afghanistan, he read Persian poetry and Farsi translations of novels. After his family received political asylum in the U.S. in '80, Hosseini earned his M.D. in '93 and began his first novel while working as an internist. The Kite Runner, one of the first Afghan novels written in English, was an international best seller, published in 38 countries. A Thousand Splendid Suns is his latest.
Khaled Hosseini
Tavis: Khaled Hosseini is quickly becoming one of the most celebrated novelists of our time. Following the enormous success of his first book, "The Kite Runner," later this year director, Marc Forester, is turning that book into a highly anticipated motion picture.
In just his first week in stores, Khaled Hosseini's latest book debuted at number one at "The New York Times" bestseller list this past Sunday. The book is called "A Thousand Splendid Suns." Khaled, nice to have you on the program.
Khaled Hosseini: It's a pleasure.
Tavis: An honor to have you here.
Hosseini: Thank you.
Tavis: I was just thinking as I walked on the stage here a moment ago that I could spend the balance of our time just talking about your personal journey without even talking about your wonderful work.
Hosseini: Oh, thanks.
Tavis: Born in Afghanistan, immigrates to the United States, ends up becoming a medical doctor and you go from the medical examination room to number one on "The New York Times" bestseller list not writing anything about what you do as a doctor. It's quite a story.
Hosseini: Yeah, it's been an interesting ride, it's true. You know, I pursued medicine as a career, but kind of my first love was writing. When I was growing up in Kabul, I was kind of this precocious little writer. I wrote short stories and little plays, so I've pretty much been writing most of my life. So it wasn't like I became a doctor and suddenly discovered a love for writing.
Tavis: What pushes you, though, beyond the point of just writing at night or writing for your own pleasure to putting your stuff out there and letting the marketplace decide whether you've written something good or not?
Hosseini: Well, ultimately, that's a decision up to the publisher. Within the writer's mind, I've always been able to put myself in a kind of a mental bunker and just play what-if with my characters and just write without much concern for the marketplace and so on. That's what publishers are for and, fortunately, they've been very supportive of my writing.
Tavis: What I'm trying to get at is, while practicing, what happened to make you decide that you wanted to pursue this, to put this out there?
Hosseini: Well, you know, when the bug gets in your head and you get the compulsion, a story and a set of characters that just won't let you go, you either go crazy or you sit down and write it down. So that's the way it happened with "The Kite Runner." I was working full-time, but the story of this friendship these two boys and the falling out between them just wouldn't leave me alone, so eventually I sat down and I wrote it.
Tavis: How blown away were you, or maybe you expected it, by the success of "The Kite Runner"?
Hosseini: Well, it was slow in coming. I couldn't pay people to read that book initially (laughter). It took a good year and a half for that book to find its readership, but when it did, boy, I started sitting next to people on the airplane who were reading it. Very surreal.
But it was good to kind of go through that stage of seeing that your book is just another book in an ocean of books and recognize that. Then when it happens, when people are reading it and telling their neighbors about it, it's extra sweet.
Tavis: So a hundred sixteen weeks later, it's still on "The New York Times" bestseller list. Marc Forester, who did "Monster's Ball" and "Finding Neverland," is now doing this first project with "The Kite Runner." What's it feel like - speaking of surreal - to see that book now with that slow build become a motion picture?
Hosseini: Oh, very surreal. I mean, I went on the movie set with Marc for a couple of weeks in China. I took my father with me. Writing is such a solitary thing. I mean, it's you and a keyboard. You're sitting down and you're creating a story, whereas filmmaking is a collaboration.
So I was kind of standing there trying to stay out of the way and watching dozens of people running around like crazy trying to, you know, bring these very internal thoughts of mine into a kind of visual experience for the audience. It was very, very surreal.
Tavis: So tell me about the new book, "A Thousand Splendid Suns."
Hosseini: Well, "The Kite Runner" was largely a story about the world of men. The three main characters were men. This book is kind of the other side of the coin. It's a story about women in Afghanistan, specifically the story of the friendship between two women who formed this very unlikely friendship that allows them to survive some very harrowing times in recent Afghan history.
"The Kite Runner," in a sense, is a story about an unlikely friendship and it's also - perhaps even more than "The Kite Runner" - a kind of a chronicling of the turmoil in Afghanistan the last thirty years.
Tavis: This book is obviously fiction, but you obviously pulled from - to your point now - some real life stuff to help to create these characters, to help to create the story line. Tell me more about how you go about putting this kind of book together in terms of story line.
Hosseini: Well, I did pull a lot of things out of reality in a way to create a convincing world for these two women, for these characters. Some of it came from a trip that I took to Afghanistan in 2003 where I met men, women and children and heard their stories. I heard some things that were so amazing that they were imprinted on my mind.
For instance, one of the doctors told me that, during the factional war, the civil war in Afghanistan, it was fairly common to have so many injured people at the hospital who were in such terrible shape that he would have to perform amputations and that sort of thing without anesthesia.
So when you hear that kind of a story, it's impossible to forget. There's a scene in this novel where a woman goes to a hospital and has a caesarian section without the benefit of anesthesia. There are many incidents like that in this novel which have their root and their basis in reality.
Tavis: Without giving the story line away, tell me more about the relationship between these two women, the two primary characters.
Hosseini: The two primary characters are Mariam and Laila. They are two women who were born a generation apart. The older woman, Mariam, is raised on the outskirts of this remote village in western Afghanistan. She's very modest, uneducated, much more of a simpler woman, whereas Laili, the younger woman, is born in a reasonably middle class family in Kabul. She's very urban, she's educated, vibrant, very ambitious, so they're kind of from two different segments of the female population, one rural and one urban.
Tragedy brings the two women together and they're foes, but eventually form a friendship which becomes deeper and deeper and becomes a bond that carries them through the factional war in Afghanistan, the rise and fall of the Taliban and really a decade of anarchy and extremism.
Tavis: What's the connection for American women readers to these two women?
Hosseini: The connection is the same as with a reader to any character in a novel, hopefully, and that these are hopefully characters who are recognizably human. Yes, they're women. Yes, they may be living under a veil. Yes, they live in a distant, enigmatic country and their living conditions are very different from somebody, say, living in California.
But these are woman. These are human beings. They have the same silliness, the same fears, the same intelligence, the same hopes, the same disillusionments, disappointments as any other person. That's what I think happened with "The Kite Runner." Yes, the characters were from a remote country, but the things they experienced, their feelings, their emotions were very universally human.
Tavis: Was it deliberate on your part or, to your earlier point in this conversation, did it just come at you that way that the first book, again, would focus on male characters and the second book would focus on female characters?
Hosseini: Well, the first book declared itself that way a little bit. As the writing went along, I saw that most of the characters are men. I decided that I wanted to write a second novel and I wanted to write the second one about women. The first novel dealt a lot with the ethnic line, the socioeconomic line, the religious line.
It didn't deal so much with the gender line and I felt that was a story that was very riveting and important and relevant and complex. I wanted to tell my slice of that story, but I thought I would do it in a different book.
Tavis: You mentioned earlier that "The Kite Runner" has a slow build and makes its way up the list and now around for these hundreds of weeks and a movie being made. This one, the exact opposite experience, as I mentioned earlier, in its first week it sits atop "The New York Times" bestseller list. How do you process that (laughter)? It's a very different journey for the second book.
Hosseini: It's very different, and it's also very different writing. It's a double edged sword in that the better a first book is received, then the more people expect out of you.
Tavis: Do you feel pressure?
Hosseini: Well, you feel pressure. Most of it comes from yourself. I mean, you want to prove to yourself that you can write a second book, that you can create these different characters and express different feelings. But, yeah, I mean, people have embraced this book. It's been tremendously wonderful. I mean, people are embracing this book and many actually seem to like it more than "The Kite Runner," which I didn't think was possible.
Tavis: But that's a good thing (laughter).
Hosseini: That's a good thing. I'm not going to complain.
Tavis: It's a very good thing. Let me ask you right quick about your humanitarian work. I should mention to the audience and you hate to even have to acknowledge this, but next Wednesday, I believe, is World Refugee Day. I mean, you hope that we live in a world one day where you don't need to have a day to call attention to the world's refugees, but next Wednesday happens to be World Refugee Day. Tell me right quick about your humanitarian work in that regard.
Hosseini: Well, I've been involved with the United Nations Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, which is one of the world's largest humanitarian organizations. Their mandate is to help protect refugees around the world. There are over twenty million refugees around the world. They provide them with emergency help and provide them with a safe environment. I've been involved with them for the last year now as a spokesperson to raise awareness and raise funds for refugees.
I've traveled with them. I went to eastern Chad and visited the refugee camps where there are some quarter of a million people from Darfur and learned about that situation firsthand and saw the human dimension in that tragedy. I know that, in the near future, my work will take me as well to the Afghan refugee camps. But it's been one of the most rewarding wonderful things I've ever experienced in my life.
Tavis: Well, thanks for your work in the regard.
Hosseini: Thank you, sir.
Tavis: If the early response is any indication for how well this book is going to do, it will be a motion picture as well in the not too distant future. The new book which sits at number one on "The New York Times" list is "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini. Dr. Hosseini, nice to have you here.
Hosseini: It's a pleasure. Thanks very much.
Tavis: Good to see you.
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