“You don’t know why, exactly, you’ve been assigned to this particular family, in this particular home, in West Sacramento, California. It’s not your job to wonder why.” So begins the title story in Jamil Jan Kochai’s National Book Award-nominated collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. Even if you don’t read the rest of this book, at the very least consider listening to Kochai’s reading of this story in a twenty-six minute episode of The New Yorker: The Writer’s Voice podcast.
This story is one of my new favorites for its subtle power and brilliance; it is at once fairly simple and deeply complex and is best listened to, rather than read. The act of listening creates the sense of participation by echoing the story’s main action: the second person narrator is an unnamed American intelligence officer listening in, quite literally, on the ordinary dramas of this Afghan American family. I will refrain from spoiling your experience with any further description. Go listen to it now.
You, the reader, might not know why you were assigned to this particular family when you finish listening to the podcast and pick up the book, but you will soon find yourself drawn into their world and compelled by it. The stories are mostly linked around an Afghan American family living in California, and some revisit events referenced in Kochai’s 2019 debut novel 99 Nights in Logar. (The novel is also good, though I found it more difficult to access as a cultural outsider—it takes the structure of One Thousand and One Nights as inspiration, often nesting stories within stories, some of which are never finished, and one key chapter is in untranslated Pashto. If you enjoy Kochai’s story collection, I recommend it as a follow-up.)
The stories in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak are often incredibly serious in subject matter but playful and formally inventive in approach. Much like Ling Ma, Kochai regularly employs the fantastic to shed fresh light on the real. In the first story, “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” a second person protagonist plays a video game in which real-life Afghanistan intersects the game version. In “Return to Sender,” two doctors in Kabul become trapped in a surreal quest to recover the pieces of their missing son. “Occupational Hazards” is told in the form of a resume. In “Waiting for Gulbuddin,” three boys wait under a mulberry tree in Logar, Afghanistan in a riff on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In “The Tale of Dully’s Reversion,” a Ph.D. student turns into a monkey and becomes a rebel warlord.
In a word, the book is expansive, moving beyond formal constraints and stereotypes alike to paint a nuanced portrait of contemporary Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in the U.S. It’s a book about being Afghan and American and Afghan American, yes; it’s also about the power of stories.
A general note: you might notice I’ve dropped the star rating. I’ve discovered the stars are difficult for me to keep consistent across genre. For example, I tend to score a novel down if I had any disappointment at all with the ending, while with a collection, I’m far more forgiving of a weakness if the strengths blew me away. From here on, I’ll stick to a qualitative approach. If I’m reviewing it, I found it worth reading and hope my review will help you decide whether you’ll enjoy it, too!
This sounds like a collection I need to consume. Thank you for the link to Kochai's reading; I will be listening to that! You've got me interested in Kochai's inventiveness with form and his ability to write potently in second person, among many other interesting elements addressed in this succinct article.