The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai

As promised, every third book (ish) will be 'off-theme', as in it won't be part of my Round the World in 80k Pages challenge. That doesn't mean, however, it won't be world literature related. As well as giving myself a chance to read something a bit different, I will be using the 'off-theme' books to complete the Storygraph Reading the World challenge, for which, one needs to read books from the 10 countries they have stipulated. I managed to bag one of the 10 (Sweden) with the tail end of my last challenge. This time it is the turn of Afghanistan. 

Jamil Jan Kochai is an Afghanistani-American writer. He was born to Afghan parents whilst they were exiled in Pakistan, and moved as a very young child to the States. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is his second book.

Again we walk the line between short-story collection and fragmentary novel, this time I think we are just on the side of collection. The stories are all linked, both with characters and setting, being split between the USA and Afghanistan. They vary considerably between realism and magical realism, but the tone between them remains consistent. If I am honest, a little too consistent. Kochia is a skilled writer, and there is much to commend the book: it gives a personal take on the kind of story we often only see in newspapers, tragedies which we are only too relieved to see are 'foreign'. Bad things happen in places like Afghanistan, we are used to that, and it dehumanises the tragedy for us. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak brings these events to life.

However, whilst Kochai's writing does what it needs to do, it never really sparkles. The book is fine, better than fine, but it's not very memorable. The stories jog along. But at no point does Kochai's pull them above this level. A couple of the tales have tried to take a different take, most notably the one told in the form of a CV, but nothing is quite enough to take it that extra step. Genre fiction is often accused of being un-innovative, of just taking tried and tested components and fitting them together in a way we have seen a hundred times before. In my opinion The Haunting of Hajjo Hotak does the same thing, but from a literary point of view. It has everything you would expect to see in a literary novel, but it misses the spark of life needed to bring the parts together, to make them something unique.

75/140

★★★☆☆