Word: hosseini
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...Hosseini was born in 1965, the son of a prosperous career diplomat. In 1979 Hosseini's father was working at the Afghan embassy in Paris when the Soviets invaded. He moved his family-- Hosseini is the oldest of five children--to San Jose, Calif...
Meanwhile Hosseini was growing up in Californian splendor. He learned English, went to high school and college, became a doctor. Audiences at Hosseini's readings are sometimes surprised at how American he looks. He's clean-shaven and handsome--at 42 he bears a passing resemblance to Antonio Banderas. He speaks English with only a slight accent; he has the kind of calm, even voice that must come in handy for delivering bad news to patients. Lounging in the kitchen of the large, neat house he shares with his wife and two children, he wears a cable-knit sweater...
...When Hosseini went back to Kabul, the prosperous, cosmopolitan metropolis he remembered was gone, replaced by a polluted, impoverished, war-shattered city. "There's a line in my first novel where this guy says, 'I feel like a tourist in my own country,'" Hosseini says. "I felt the same way." He strolled around Kabul for weeks visiting relatives and talking to people he met in the street. "Some of the things I heard, I wouldn't have believed. This one guy told me he walked into a house one day and saw these three girls: one killed...
...stories like that that made Hosseini realize he had to write A Thousand Splendid Suns. Unlike The Kite Runner, it has no scenes set in America. This is a book about Afghans in Afghanistan, covering the past 30-plus years of Afghan history almost month by month. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy playboy, forced into a loveless marriage to the boorish shoemaker Rasheed. Childless, the couple adopts 14-year-old Laila, who was orphaned by a rocket attack. Rasheed proceeds to take Laila as a second wife. Confined to a single claustrophobic household, beaten and denied love...
...Thousand Splendid Suns probably won't be as commercially successful as Hosseini's first novel, but it is, to put it baldly, a better book. Where The Kite Runner told an appealing but somewhat programmatic tale of redemption, Suns is a dense, rich, pressure-packed guide to enduring the unendurable. (Though there's still plenty of action: "I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader," Hosseini admits.) Where the characters in The Kite Runner ran heavily to unredeemable sinners and spotless saints, in Suns the characters are more complex and paradoxical--more human...