![]() I read the story not knowing that someday I'd write about similar things. None of those four boys is ever going to be the same again. By the time they return home, each one has changed fundamentally. ![]() Stephen King captures this brilliantly, and with such humanity, for the boys in this story. Your innocent understanding of the world moves towards something messier and more complicated, and once it does you can never go back. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. I was absolutely floored by it "The Body," a story about kids who go searching for a corpse in the woods, impacted me especially. I don't remember how I picked up Different Seasons, but it was a book I read on a grave shift. (Maybe I'll get in trouble now, 30 years too late.) So I spent my grave shifts studying, reading books, and writing short stories. Luckily, at night, there was no one around to supervise what I did. I found this an unbelievably cruel expectation: to stay up all night alone with nothing to do except stare at surveillance screens and an empty parking lot. I had a camera trained on me like Big Brother, and if a book snuck onto your lap you'd get a call from a vigilant boss somewhere: "Put that away, son." Grave, by contrast, was a perfect time to do homework or read-but you weren't supposed to. Trying to read during the day was a nightmare. ![]() I'd make a round of the building once an hour, but otherwise had to pass time at my desk. Then I'd watch over the building alone, everything totally dark. Just as often, I worked the graveyard shift-which started at 11 p.m. During the day I'd sit at the front desk to sign guests in and check their bags. This was a high-tech building in Santa Clara, engineers coming in and out all the time. Khaled Hosseini: My freshman year in college, I got a job working security. The novel, narrated in many voices, explores the long legacy of that decision. Like "The Body," it explores the way that childhood events shape us: A father, crippled by poverty in rural Afghanistan, keeps his son alive by selling his daughter to a wealthy adoptive family in Kabul. His latest, And the Mountains Echoed, comes out Tuesday. His first two novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, sold 38 million copies in 10 years. For Hosseini, this opening beautifully invokes the anxiety that our words will come out mangled and misheard-as well as the joy we feel when people, against all odds, connect.ĭespite the author's ever-present awareness of his limitations, Hosseini's books have profoundly resonated with readers. The narrator, Gordie LaChance, wants to tell the reader about the time he saw a dead body as a kid-but he's sure he won't do the story justice. So when I asked him to discuss a favorite passage from literature, Hosseini chose the opening passage from Stephen King's story "The Body," which comes from a book of four novellas called Different Seasons (and was adapted for the screen by Rob Reiner as Stand by Me, starring River Phoenix). But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world."Ĭormac McCarthy's The Road May Have the Scariest Passage in All of Literature Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. "Everyone is an ocean inside," he told me. Even for novelists, words only approximate the vividness and urgency of thought. The reason for this, says author Khaled Hosseini, is that it's terribly hard for a book to recreate the scope and grandeur of an author's ideas before they hit the page. Writers often keep writing and keep refining, even as the waiting world hollers that it's finally time to stop. Herman Melville scribbled changes onto the final proofs of Moby-Dick until the printer's deadlines could wait no longer in her journals, Virginia Woolf announced at least four separate times that she'd finally completed The Waves. Most novels are never finished, only abandoned. By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |