The Haunting of Hajji Hotak | Book Review

This past summer I joined New York State Summer Writers Institute, a two-week writing workshop at Skidmore College. In one of my one-on-one meetings with the workshop leader, Claire Messud, I asked her if she had any books in mind for me to read. I ask this question to experienced writers all the time, because I want to find books that speak to my style. Claire didn’t have anything in mind but promised to get back to me.

The week after the workshop was over, I received an email from Claire recommending The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai. I ordered the book, stopped reading what I was reading, and read through Kochai’s short story collection. I knew he was a great writer from the first story.

The collection begins and ends with stories in a second-person narrative. In the first story, we are playing a shooting game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, with the main character, a teenager named Mirwais. We are in the game, in Afghanistan, killing, searching, and destroying until the story takes a sharp turn. We arrive at Mirwais' family home in Afghanistan, while in the game, we meet his family, where he realizes how desensitized he’s been to killing his own people since Call of Duty. In the last story, we are a secret agent, who is spying on an Afghan American family going through financial hardship in West Sacramento. The spy, fascinated by the family, doesn’t call off his operation even after realizing that the family was not a threat. In between both stories, Kochai explores form to render the tragedy of war: parents who receive a mysterious package with their son’s finger, a student in California transforms into a monkey, a family’s history told through a 21-page resume. The generational violence of war is experienced through each story, and they haunt the reader well after closing the book. We are tugged through Logar, Kabul, Afghan weddings, California, and battlefields in a video game and memory. The end of each story comes suddenly like the appearance of a cliff after a long hike between the woods. You look down and there is another story waiting for you.

Jamil Jan Kochai is not only a talented writer but a practitioner of precision, form, and compassion. With all the pain the pages seep, he still managed to be funny, giving the stories a breath of life even during the hardest of times. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak is a narrative masterpiece that explores generational tragedies caused by war at the national and family level.