Word: hosseini
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Graphic novels--long comic books for grownups--have always had mostly cult appeal. Last year's most successful, the 13th volume in a Japanese manga adventure series--Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto--sold 80,000 copies, far short of 2007's hottest novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, which sold more than 1.5 million copies. The point of the comics was largely their transgressiveness. "They're the last pirate medium," says Millar, a Scottish writer who consults for Marvel Comics on more mainstream fare, like Iron Man. "They're the last medium for a mass audience where...
...ends in contemporary America, and the story it tells is firmly set against the history of modern Afghanistan, from a point just before the Soviet invasion of that unhappy land to the moment after the Taliban imposed its hateful fundamentalism on the country. Yet the movie version of Khaled Hosseini's best selling novel doesn't feel like it has been, as people used to say, "ripped from headlines." It instead has about it something of the air of a big, rich, very old-fashioned novel, telling the far-ranging story of two boys, one of them rich and well...
...those rare literary works that became an addiction for millions of readers, Khaled Hosseini's novel has been filmed most reverently. The movie is the book, with its narrative force and fondness for plot clichés. Amir (Ebrahimi, far right), a child of privilege in Afghanistan, loves to fly kites with his best friend, Hassan (Mahmoodzada), the son of his father's servant. One day Hassan is raped by a bully and his gang, and Amir, who sees the assault, does nothing to stop it. Indeed, he becomes vindictive toward Hassan, leading to many betrayals and reversals that will...
...read you can almost feel Hosseini's range as a writer expanding. The Kite Runner was pretty much exclusively about men; Suns is largely about women--in the interest of authenticity Hosseini actually tried on a burqa. ("Just to see what it felt like," he says. "Nobody was around. It steals your breath away. It's really hard to get used to.") In The Kite Runner we witnessed, from a distance, one of the Taliban's infamous executions by Kalashnikov in a soccer stadium. In Suns we experience a similar execution firsthand, from the point of view of the victim...
...Hosseini's books have yet to be published in his own country--few have the time and money to read novels, anyway--but he does get letters from Afghans. Most are proud of the world-famous writer their country has produced, but he gets some hate mail too. "They feel that yes, there are problems in Afghanistan, but do we really need to talk about these things? At this time?" There's probably a grain of truth there--there's something distinctively American and confessional about Hosseini's work. He shrugs. For the first time he sounds a little angry...