Kite Runner - an Interview with Khaled Houssini

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An Interview with Khaled Houssini As you were writing the "The Kite Runner" book, what did you expect to happen after its release? I had very modest hopes initially. I [hoped] a few people would actually read it. I wasn't sure that this was the kind of book that would have wide appeal because it was set in a distant country [Afghanistan] that a lot of people didn't know--and maybe even didn't care much about. As an Afghan, I hoped that [readers] would see Afghanistan--an Afghanistan that they don't always see when they're watching CNN or Fox or any other kind of news outlet, which focus on two or three of the usual things. I hoped that they would see a unique kind of window into Afghan culture: the way they eat and the way they live and the way they marry and the way they die and some other [depiction of] what life was like before the Soviets invaded. How much of you is in the character of Amir? His trials and tribulations are not necessarily mine, although I grew up in this pre Soviet war Kabul. I belonged to the same kind of [socio-economic] background as he did. I went to the same school as he. I was a writer at a very young age. In fact, the little short story that he writes in the film for Hassan was something that I had written, I think back in 1974. I loved flying kites with all my friends in Kabul. It was almost like a rite of passage.... I loved film, especially Westerns. I got moved to the [United] States in the wake of the Soviet invasion, went through many of the immigrant experiences that he did with his father: Seeing all the professional Afghans who are now running gas stations and that sort of thing. So, all of that came from my life. But, the story line itself, what happens between the boys and so on, that's imaginary. The kite is just one of the many symbols in the story. Do you have a favorite symbol?

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