The "Kite Runner" controversy

Khaled Hosseini explains why the movie version of his bestselling novel should not be reduced to a single rape scene.

By Erika Milvy

Read more: Movies, Afghanistan, Arts & Entertainment

Dec. 9, 2007 | In March 2001, Khaled Hosseini started writing "The Kite Runner," his semiautobiographical saga about coming of age in Afghanistan and coming to America after the Soviet invasion -- and returning to Afghanistan after the rise of the Taliban.

Six months into his work on the book, the events of 9/11 occurred. The times were cataclysmic, but for Hosseini, a practicing physician with an unpublished manuscript, the timing was propitious.

It was the year many Americans first learned where Kabul, the country's capital, was and who the Taliban were. To a great extent, Americans had pictured Afghanistan as a land of cave-dwelling terrorists. "The Kite Runner," which became an international bestseller -- translated into 40 languages, it has sold 8 million copies worldwide -- helped fill in that very rudimentary picture. The book has served to bridge the cultural divide and surmount headlines with its story of a young boy contending with political and personal turmoil.

The first novel published in English by an author from Afghanistan, "The Kite Runner" is the story of Amir, the young son of a well-to-do Afghan diplomat in 1970s Kabul. Amir's close but ambivalent friendship with -- and lifelong shame regarding -- his Hazara servant Hassan is at the heart of the book. It is a relationship that haunts Amir from Kabul to California, where Amir and his father move after the Soviets invade Afghanistan.

Like Amir, Hosseini grew up in an affluent household in Kabul in the 1970s, though the author also spent part of his childhood in Tehran, Iran, and Paris. In 1980, he and his family were granted political asylum in the United States and moved to San Jose, where he still lives with his wife and two children. It wasn't until 2003, with his book in production, that the author returned to Afghanistan to visit the land of his birth and retrace his character's footsteps.

While Hosseini drew much of the book -- its cultural richness, accounts of ethnic conflicts, even its evocation of annual children's kite contests -- from his own experience, Amir's harrowing story is fiction. Beautifully written, startling and heart wrenching, "The Kite Runner" is also an episodic page turner. It's a winning recipe for book club consumption -- and film adaptation.

Now, as he anticipates the premiere of the movie version of "The Kite Runner," the 42-year-old author, who no longer practices medicine and whose second novel, "A Thousand Splendid Suns," was published in May, talks about Americans' positive response to his book and some Afghans' outrage at the movie, which includes a 30-second scene depicting the rape of a boy, played by a 12-year-old Afghan, Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada. (Mahmidzada's parents said they had no knowledge of this plot point when they agreed to let their son act in the movie.) Word of the rape scene has triggered threats of violence against the three Afghan child actors who appear in the film, demands that the scene be cut, articles about Hollywood exploitation -- and an ensuing P.R. disaster for Paramount, which agreed to delay the film's release until the kids were safely out of Afghanistan. Last week, the studio announced that the children and their guardians had been relocated to an unnamed city in the United Arab Emirates, clearing the way for the film's release this Friday.

Salon sat down with Hosseini in San Francisco in October, just before "The Kite Runner" premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

To what extent was "The Kite Runner" a product of geopolitical timing? That is, just after Afghanistan and Afghans reached the headlines here and showed up on Americans' radar, your book comes out. Did you think, "Well, now there's finally an interest in the region" or "Now it's a marketable story"?

The timing wasn't intentional, but it kind of worked out that way. I really meant the book as a challenge to myself to write a novel. I had always written short stories and I'd written a short story called "Kite Runner" and I went about expanding the short story to a novel. When 9/11 happened, my wife really started talking to me about submitting a novel. I was reluctant at first, but eventually I came around to her way of looking at it, which was that this story could show a completely different side of Afghanistan. Usually stories about Afghanistan fall into "Taliban and war on terror" or "narcotics" -- the same old things. But here's a story about family life, about customs, about the drama within this household, a window into a different side of Afghanistan.

Do you think the book would have gotten the same attention if the U.S. hadn't been in the midst of a war in Afghanistan?

It helped the novel be published, but being published and having people still embracing the book four years later are two very different things. People read the books and tell their friends to read the book because they connect with something in the story.

Americans don't always put a human face on international news. But "The Kite Runner," which was the third bestselling book here in 2005 and was voted 2006's reading group book of the year, has helped demystify Afghanistan for a lot of people. Is that icing on the cake for you?

It's a hell of an icing if that's what it is. It's tremendous for me. Fiction has the ability of taking the reader to a place they would have never gone before, and putting them in the shoes of characters who are radically different than they are.

One of the most common comments I get -- from my Web site, e-mails or letters -- typically goes something like this: "I have to be honest with you, I really didn't know much about Afghanistan and I frankly didn't care much, and then somebody said you have to read this book and then I kind of reluctantly agreed, and all of a sudden Afghanistan has become a real place to me and the Afghans have become real people and I see the parallels between my life here and the life of the people in this completely remote country, and now when there's a news story about Afghanistan -- be it a bombing or an attack on a village -- it registers on a very personal level." That to me, that's wonderful.

Did you create the character of Amir as a stand-in for you?

No more than most first-time novelists who write in the first person. The setting in 1970s Kabul, the house where Amir lived, the films that he watches, of course the kite flying, the love of storytelling -- all of that is from my own childhood. The story line is fictional.

Next page: "Things in Afghanistan have changed"