Khaled Hosseini’s new novel, “And the Mountains Echoed,” is a multigenerational story about separation — about the holes in our lives and what we do to fill them. Afghanistan, where he was born, is again a key setting.
The author of the best-sellers “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” — a combined 38 million copies worldwide — spoke on the phone recently about family, abandonment, courage and how his time in medical school at UC San Diego shaped him as a writer.
Hosseini will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla on June 26 for a ticketed event (already sold out) sponsored by Warwick’s bookstore and Words Alive, a nonprofit reading advocacy group.
Q: What is the significance of the word “echoed” in the title of your new book?
A: The book begins with a simple event, which is the separation of two children, and then that one act ends up rippling out and echoing across generations, across continents, and has long-lasting consequences in the lives of a great number of people, both intended and unintended. So I like that idea of beginning with that one event and having it echo throughout the rest of the book. It just kind of looms over everything else.
Q: Are there events from your own life that continue to echo for you?
A: Oh, gosh, isn’t there in everyone’s life? Maybe the turning point in my life, and what has made the rest of this life possible, was that my father (a diplomat) was assigned to go to Paris in October of 1976 and he took us with him. If we had stayed in Kabul, chances are that he would have been imprisoned and God forbid executed in the communist coup that happened in April of 1978. I might have been recruited into the Afghan army. I might have been injured. We might have gone to Pakistan. Who knows how our lives would have turned out?
Q: All of your books have on some level been about family. Why is that important for you to write about?
A: It’s not that I think it’s important to me; it’s that I feel drawn to it. I’m drawn to it because I find everything that I want to write about is there. I like writing about friendship, about love. I like writing about feeling disappointed by somebody. Regret. Duty. Sacrifice. Obligation. Responsibility. Reconciliation. All of those things exist within the confines of families, and they exist in very different ways in different families.
Family is very, very central to the way I’ve always understood myself because of my formative years in Afghanistan. Family is the way you make sense of your surroundings, how you understand your world, how you connect to other people. In that society, it was extremely rich socially. You didn’t really view yourself as an isolated individual but rather as a member of a bigger ensemble whose existence really only made sense in the context of that bigger ensemble. It’s very central to my life, and continues to be even today. I’m forever drawn to it.
Q: Do you ever feel like you’ve figured it out?
A: No. Families are enigmatic puzzles. And things you’ve figured out are no fun to write about. It’s only fun to write about things that confound you and infuriate you and keep pulling you back.
Q: You write in this book as you have in others about abandonment. Why?
A: I’ve seen a whole lot of it in Afghanistan. So yes, abandonment, but I really see this as a book about people being separated from parts of themselves that they view as essential and vital. That separation has created a sense of absence, a sense of a big gaping hole in the middle of their lives, and they spend much of their lives trying to fill that, trying to be reunited with these parts of themselves that they’ve lost. Some succeed, some don’t, although even those who succeed do so in ways they never saw coming.