“I had an innate sense as a child that the war was a deep part of who my parents were, so tied up in how they told stories and how they understood reality and existed in the world.”
Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be, and why?
Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California, and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’s War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the US army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Jamil joins Northwestern professor Kalyan Nadiminti and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about narrative form and the cycles of war.
We begin by discussing the second person, a technique Jamil uses throughout Hajji Hotak. He describes it as the most “dangerous perspective” for a fiction writer to take because it brings readers to the edge of the immersive world fiction is supposed to create. The second person in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, from which Jamil reads, forces readers to grapple with our own complicity in the surveillance of Afghan families in the United States and to consider the paradoxical affection that develops between people on opposing sides of war. From there, Jamil, Kalyan, and Aarthi discuss the relationship between video games as mass media and the novel as literary form. Jamil is a huge fan of Final Fantasy 7 (who isn’t?) and talks about how games like Call of Duty (a game he played more ambivalently) perform a recruitment function for the US army. He rewrites that vision of war in more complex terms in his own story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.” Kalyan reflects on how the category of the post-9/11 writer intersects with the War on Terror, and the three of us consider the symbolic function of 9/11 in contemporary fiction written from inside and outside the United States.
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View a transcript of the episode here. 
TK