Kochai, an Afghan-American writer, shapes and reshapes his material through a variety of formal techniques, including a fantasy of salvation through video gaming, a darkly surrealist fable of loss, a life story told through a mock résumé, and the story of a man’s transformation into a monkey who becomes a rebel leader...Like Asturias, Kochai is a master conjurer...The collection’s cohesion lies in its thematic exploration of the complexities of contemporary Afghan experience (both in Afghanistan and the United States), and in the recurring family narrative at its core: many of the stories deal with an Afghan family settled in California...Kochai is a thrillingly gifted writer, and this collection is a pleasure to read, filled with stories at once funny and profoundly serious, formally daring, and complex in their apprehension of the contradictory yet overlapping worlds of their characters.
It doesn’t pay to try to connect the characters and stories too literally. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak is better taken as a whole, a brilliant, crazy quilt exploring filial devotion, religious beliefs, family, history and the effects of endless war. It’s also an education of sorts on the history of Afghanistan and the culture of Afghan Americans, although this is no primer for the non-Afghan reader. Kochai peppers his writing liberally with language and references that are up to you to look up if you don’t understand.
American literature is necessarily littered with meditations on violence—its ubiquity, its marrow-deep kinship with this country’s mythology of frontiers tamed and destiny manifested. But although Jamil Jan Kochai’s writing touches on these themes, his profound and visceral short-story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, is much more an interrogation of another central facet of modern American violence: its absurdity. More than almost any other work of fiction I’ve read in the post-9/11 era, Kochai’s collection lays bare the surrealism that colors nearly every interaction between one of history’s most powerful empires and the people it considers disposable. By using a fantastical style to describe the ordinary lives lost over the course of the war, Kochai brings into relief the farcical nature of a conflict in which an army can investigate itself for the death of phantom terrorists killed remotely from a control room. The result is a dark literary impeachment, a fable in which the emperor is missing not clothes but a conscience ... Simply detailing the scope and nature of the War on Terror’s carnage is one thing, but Kochai, whose stories feature anthropomorphic monkeys who instigate revolutions and a child’s severed limbs dutifully reattached by his mother, opts for a far less-traveled road, creating a world so preposterous that the violence seems like just another type of everyday absurdity. In a vacuum, Kochai’s characters and scenes would come off as ludicrous, but framed against the past two decades, they reveal how inured we’ve become to the strangeness of war. The book’s central means of indictment is to show us just how terrifyingly routine violence became for anyone who lived through the U.S. military’s prolonged campaign in response to the September 11 attacks ... In clumsier hands, such subject matter might result in monotonously dour pieces of fiction...Kochai achieves the opposite. The stories in this collection are wildly divergent in form and style, veering from surreal to photorealistic to, in some cases, both at once ... Kochai’s fiction speaks to the human need to make sense of overwhelming violence—who survives it and who doesn’t; who is held culpable and who isn’t. Such questions are often considered the domain of distant others, but Kochai makes his readers confront them head-on. His stories aren’t about some faraway people. There’s no such thing as faraway people.
... brilliant ... Kochai seamlessly weaves in and out of war, and back and forth between Afghanistan and Northern California, crafting stories that are sometimes folkloric and other times distinctly contemporary. An armed insurrection of monkeys taking over Afghanistan, and an FBI agent spying on, and developing an emotional attachment to, an unsuspecting suburban Afghan-American family both feel completely inevitable and unextraordinary because of the measured, almost casual prose with which the stories are crafted. The result is a collection that has the aura of an oral tradition of storytelling; as if you’re hearing them directly from an elder or cousin who has lived these stories and feels no need to sensationalize the details, no matter how sensational they are ... It’s not often you read stories featuring former mujahideen, a college student willing to die for love and Palestinian liberation, or even sympathetic FBI agents for that matter. And that’s what makes Kochai’s masterful collection so refreshing and riveting. We’ve been told such boring, distorted, and harmful stories about Afghans, Muslims, and the War on Terror. It would be easy for a writer to fall into the trap of taking those lazy, bad-faith stories seriously and to try to write against their current, attempting to offer a correction of sorts...But Kochai doesn’t fall for it ... Kochai penned a collection of highly original, enchanting stories on his own terms, decentering the narrative debris of the War on Terror, and opting to create his own spectacular worlds instead. He honors the multifaceted and rich cultural, familial, and spiritual lives of Afghans and Afghan-Americans without robbing them of moral complexity, reducing their lives to how they interact with bland, vicious stereotypes, or casting them as a monolith ... Lighthearted yet powerful and oftentimes funny, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak is an incredible work of deep empathy and care, with witty writing and sharp stories that take unpredictable turns.
Kochai, with dark humor and lush surrealism, employs video game culture, fairy tale conventions, autofiction, and meta-commentary to tell stories about military occupation in the Logar Province of Afghanistan, where the author’s family is from and where many of the characters reside, as well as relocation to the U.S. The result is a collection that feels punchy and postmodern without trying too hard to lend itself to that aesthetic ... These stories are imaginative, dexterous, and thrilling.
Kochai’s fiction has a spoken flair, and part of the beauty of his vision of Afghanistan is the essentiality of its language. Scores of words from Pashto and other languages—unmolested by italics—populate the collection, and their accumulation deepens one’s sense of the strangeness, and beauty, of the real: pakol, suhoor, patus, toshak, Fajr adhan, chinar, attan, patki, khala, zina, deen, fard, sunna, nafl, Qari, dhikr, janaza, istinja, wudhu…. These words in no way impede the movement of the stories, which unfold with terrific momentum. Kochai has a gift for knowing what makes the engine of a story turn over and go, what formal choices might deliver a narrative in such a way as to coax a reader to endure a set of experiences that, whatever their frequent delights—and the stories are uncommonly full of them—are rooted in sorrow, loss, and rage ... Kochai’s collection is without sanctimony. It is also without any sort of soft-focus cuteness or exoticism.
Afghanistan is rendered less as a country and more as a dreamscape ... Too many of the stories lean heavily on unconventional form to create intrigue, a reliance that can come at the expense of substance ... At times Kochai relies disappointingly on caricature ... What unites the stories in Kochai’s collection is that they’re similarly haunted.
... stunning ... there is a breathless quality to Kochai’s writing as we are taken through large periods of history, but with enough signposting of violence that we can never detach these personal and historical moments from the impact they have on the human beings who live through them ... This, in essence, is one of the great successes of Kochai’s writing, the ability to inform of us of so much while expending very little effort in doing so ... evokes a ghostly resonance, but these spectral references are far from the occult, they are the living ghosts that are encoded into the limbs of those who have survived bombings attacks; they exist in the amygdala and hippocampus of the brain’s fear system, only resurfacing to re-experience past traumas once again ... Through his mystical stories, Jamil Jan Kochai manifests these ghosts of the past, ones that leave the reader breathless in their intensity, but also the ones that are important in reminding us of the world that has been left for Afghans, who continue to pay multitudes of penalties for their very existence.
Kochai’s writing is graceful all while tackling subjects like war and occupation and how families suffer from them, both in Afghanistan and overseas ... The entire collection is notable for the diversity of Kochai’s stories and the way in which he creates compassionate characters from all walks of life. It’s no surprise it’s a finalist for 2022 National Book Award for Fiction.
Kochai’s fiction has a spoken flair, and part of the beauty of his vision of Afghanistan is the essentiality of its language. Scores of words from Pashto and other languages—unmolested by italics—populate the collection, and their accumulation deepens one’s sense of the strangeness, and beauty, of the real ... These words in no way impede the movement of the stories, which unfold with terrific momentum. Kochai has a gift for knowing what makes the engine of a story turn over and go, what formal choices might deliver a narrative in such a way as to coax a reader to endure a set of experiences that, whatever their frequent delights—and the stories are uncommonly full of them—are rooted in sorrow, loss, and rage ... Kochai’s collection is without sanctimony. It is also without any sort of soft-focus cuteness or exoticism.
Kochai offers extraordinary stories embracing Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in language that’s scathing, sharply whittled, and sometimes absurdist or even surreal...An obsessive video-gaming teenager, resigned to killing fighters onscreen that resemble his father, actually spots him and a now-dead uncle in a game and seeks to rescue them, while U.S.-based husband-and-wife doctors who have returned to Kabul for a year end up stitching together the multiple pulsing pieces of their son delivered by a kidnapper...In a single-sentence tour de force, a woman whose only surviving son is haranguing her for failing to take her pills shuts him out as she recalls her multiple losses in starkly vivid language that cascades painfully down the page...An acute and original work bringing all readers closer to Afghanistan.
... a book of candid devastation and unabashed tenderness and bittersweet delights. Setting his stories inside the Afghan diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, Kochai encourages us to ask: What is the meaning of home? Who are our family? What is holding us together and in grace, the way a string holds the kite runner to the kite? How do we sustain hope despite the infernal violence we inflict upon one another?
... captivating ... In turns amusing and devastating, the stories are rich with vivid scenes and distinct narrative voices ... Many of these stories end in violence or tragedy, but on the whole, the collection is far from repetitive; the range of framing and styles keeps the reader on their toes and delivers emotional impact in one hard-hitting entry after another. Readers won’t want to miss this.
In his second book, Kochai offers a dozen short stories focusing on the lives of Afghans and Afghan Americans...The collection kicks off with 'Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,' the story of Mirwais, a young man whose video gaming session turns surreal when he realizes the nonplayer characters he encounters seem to be his father and other relatives in 1980s Afghanistan...The story is told in the second person, lending an urgency to the narrative: 'You’ve been shooting at Afghans in Call of Duty for so long that you’ve become oddly immune to the self-loathing you felt when you were first massacring wave after wave of militant fighters who looked just like your father'...In 'The Tale of Dully’s Reversion,' the title character, a California student teacher who has lost his religion, finds himself transformed into a monkey when he steps in front of his devout mother’s prayer mat...Following an imam’s advice, his mother takes him to Afghanistan to fast at a martyr’s shrine in the hopes that it will make him human again...Like every other story in this collection, it’s brilliant and written beautifully, with real precision and compassion...Kochai doesn’t make a false move in this book; like his previous one, it’s a master class in storytelling, and a beautiful reflection on a people that have endured decades upon decades of tragedy...Stunning, compassionate, flawless.
