Remembering life in a forgotten Afghanistan

The Afghanistan that Khaled Hosseini remembers from his childhood in the early ‘70s -- before the communists and the Taliban, the dictators and the wars -- is counterintuitive to most Americans, trained by nearly a quarter-century of news reports to consider the country a ravaged wasteland.

In Hosseini’s memory, Kabul is a quietly enlightened landscape, a city where custom and contemporary life come together, where there is no television but cowboy movies play at local cinemas, where adults discuss history and philosophy, then watch their children participate in kite-fighting tournaments, a tradition passed down across many years.

It is this experience that serves as a starting point for Hosseini’s first novel, “The Kite Runner,” in which he explores issues of character and country, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that narrative and history intersect.

It only makes sense that the book should involve the interplay between the individual and the global narrative, for this has long been a factor in Hosseini’s life.

The son of an Afghan diplomat and a schoolteacher, he came to America in 1980, and at 38, is a Bay Area physician with two young children of his own. “My parents were educated people,” he says. “They had established lives, and when we came to the States, we left everything behind. We had to start from zero, and that was a hard blow to their dignity and their pride. It didn’t change who they were, but it changed the way they lived.”

Such vicissitudes, such shifts in fortune, represent an essential aspect of “The Kite Runner” (Riverhead), which tells the story of an Afghan boy named Amir who escapes to the West with his father in the wake of the Soviet invasion and ends up in San Jose, where he must construct a new life out of the shards of the past. That these shards never quite fit together infuses the book with a jagged tension, as if its characters were split between two distinct, conflicting worlds.

Mostly, this emerges through Amir’s father, Baba, an influential man in Afghanistan, who does his best to assimilate but can take the process only so far.

In one of the book’s most potent scenes, Baba shocks a San Jose welfare officer by returning a book of food stamps -- something Hosseini recalls his own father doing not long after the family came to the United States.

“That happened,” the author says, smiling at the memory. “My father volunteered us out of welfare, and he took on a bunch of jobs. In fact, the whole structure of Afghan American immigrant life in the middle third of the book, much of it is drawn from my own experience.”

Because of these experiences, “The Kite Runner” has, at its heart, a sense of loss, of displacement, of the ineluctable distance between the present and the past. It is a loss made palpable by the first-person structure of the novel, the fact that the reader sees everything through the eyes of someone who not only knows, but also feels, that his old way of life is gone.

“What was lost in Afghanistan,” Hosseini says in a quiet bookstore overlooking the bustle of San Vicente Boulevard, “was a fairly liberal and, at least in urban areas, surprisingly sophisticated society with an intellectual life and a functioning bureaucracy and exposure to Western culture and so on. That Afghanistan has been forgotten.

“For most people, Afghanistan is the Soviet war and the Taliban. But before that, people in Afghanistan lived for decades in peaceful anonymity. And that’s the Afghanistan I remember, because I left before everything started.”

Of course, even within the relatively peaceful period of the early 1970s, Afghanistan was marked by deep-seated divisions, disunities even -- a situation, Hosseini believes, that has everything to do with the tribal nature of Afghan life.

“Afghanistan,” he says, “has always been a scattering of tribes. Within the Pashtun alone, there are at least 30 subtribes, so people identify themselves by who their ancestors were. Also, in much of Afghanistan, people lived in compounds with very high walls. And they essentially lived as family units, very secluded from other people. That was where identity came from, that was who you were, who your obligations were to, sometimes overriding your own.”

This represents a key motif in the novel: the close, even insular nature of family, the connection of blood and trust. The flip side, though, is how it contributes to a rigid social hierarchy in which tribal origin is, first and foremost, a matter of class.

For Amir, that comes to a head when he betrays his best friend, Hassan, who is also his servant -- an act he justifies because the other boy belongs to a lesser tribe.

Such a situation, Hosseini stresses, is not autobiographical, but it does indicate a certain attitude, a social structure that fueled the chaos that followed the Soviet withdrawal from the country, a chaos that culminated in a four-year civil war.

Things grew so bad that when the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, they were greeted as liberators, if only for having made the fighting stop.

“If you’re going to be shot for crossing the street to buy a bottle of milk,” Hosseini says, “you don’t care who comes. You’ll take the safety. Of course, Afghanistan ended up trading one beast for another, and the honeymoon with the Taliban didn’t last long.”

The emergence of the Taliban from the ashes of the Soviet occupation only highlights the notion of history as a continuum, in which there is no real line of demarcation between the polarities of the Cold War and the ever-shifting boundaries of our uniquely fluid age. To Hosseini, though, that’s all backdrop to the question of what we do when confronted with issues of love and loyalty, the eternal human drama of trying to do what’s right. For Amir, the fundamental conflicts are internal, and although “The Kite Runner” does ultimately suggest a passage toward redemption, it is redemption in a highly personal way.

Although it’s impossible for a novel about contemporary Afghanistan not to exist in the ghostly shadows of the World Trade Center, Sept. 11 is mentioned only briefly in the book. “The event is so huge,” Hosseini notes, “that the best way to deal with it is not to deal with it much. It speaks for itself.” By the same token, with the exception of a vivid set piece involving the stoning of two adulterers, the brutality of the Taliban is only glancingly addressed.

Instead, Hosseini offers a more personally devastated Kabul, where the hospitality that marked Amir’s childhood has not disappeared, but rather gone underground. This is something of an extrapolation, for Hosseini wrote “The Kite Runner” without returning to Afghanistan; he went back for the first time in March, a few months before the book’s release.

In the end, however, it doesn’t matter -- for writing fiction is primarily a matter of imagination, of getting inside a character’s world. To re-create Kabul, Hosseini “took the city I remembered and superimposed, like a transparency, everything I’d learned about it since. That knowledge came not only from newspapers, TV and radio, but from accounts of people who’d lived through those days.”

Still, he admits, “When I went to Kabul, I found to my considerable relief that I hadn’t messed it up too badly. You write what you know, what you’ve experienced, and here I was experiencing what I had already written -- and sort of holding my breath.”

What this all gets back to is the peculiar challenge of the novelist who seeks to produce timely fiction, to engage the sweep of history from an individual point of view. In the end, it depends on a certain balance, a delicate give-and-take between narrative and information, literature and reportage.

“A very interesting thing happened after 9/11,” Hosseini says about the novel, which he began in March 2001 and set aside for several months after the twin towers fell. “I started to write the end of the book and I realized that it couldn’t be the same as what I’d had in mind. Instead, I began to write about things that had happened just weeks before. I was writing chapters, and there were chapters in Afghan history being written, and I was treading this very freshly paved path....

“It’s strange, this idea of having history catch up with your fiction,” Hosseini says. “It’s a little dizzying.”