Recently, I read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Mr. Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, where most of this story takes place. Also, like the main character, he emigrated from Afghanistan to northern California. Yet another similarity between them is that the main character becomes a successful writer, just like Mr. Hosseini. While the story is not an autobiography, sometimes it sure sounds like that because the author writes in first person and so passionately. In fact, for the first 50 pages, I thought the book was an autobiography.
I would rate this book a 9 out of 10 because it is really a great coming-of-age novel and every chapter leaves you hanging on the edge of a cliff to find about what happens next. However, since it is written for adults, some of the language and plot developments are a bit too mature for my tastes. Critics call the book a coming-of-age novel, because Amir, the main character and narrator, begins the story in 1975 Kabul, a period of relative peace in the turbulent city's past. Amir's father is a prominent entrepreneur with a respectable family name and the largest house in the neighborhood. He also has two servants, Ali, his lifelong friend, and Hassan, Amir's best friend. Although sometimes Amir likes to feel his superiority over Hassan and treat him unkindly, most of the time the two pals just hang out, flying kites or reading stories. The one problem is, Hassan feels a sacred, unbreakable loyalty to Amir, and sometimes this makes Amir uncomfortable, because even when he treats Hassan badly, Hassan is always the same: faithful, obedient, almost docile. But one day, this all changes, as Amir witnesses Hassan being brutally beaten up by the neighborhood's terror, Assef.
If I were the author, I know I wouldn’t have fast-forwarded from when Amir and his father, Baba were leaving Kabul for the last time to escape to Peshawar, Pakistan to when they are living in Fremont, California. The reason they were doing this was to escape the new Soviet regime, which didn’t like free-thinking entrepreneurs like Baba. So, they had to leave in the dead of night, leaving their house looking like they had just gone out for a walk or something, even leaving their dinner dishes out. First, they sat with about 20 other Afghanis in a large military truck on a journey of 170 kilometers to Jalalabad, an eastern Afghan city. After that, they waited several weeks in a smelly basement with the other emigrants for another truck across the Himalayas to Peshawar. But after this, the story cuts to Fremont, as Amir is graduating from high school. Personally, I was excited to see how the father and son made the journey across Asia to California. This might not have been very eventful, but still, I would’ve liked to know anyway.
I was struck by this passage: “We trekked up the hill, our boots squishing in the muddy snow. Neither one of us said anything. We sat under our pomegranate tree and I knew I’d made a mistake. I shouldn’t have come up the hill. The words I’d carved on the tree trunk with Ali’s kitchen knife, Amir and Hassan: The Sultans of Kabul…. I couldn’t stand looking at them now.”
This passage really made a mark on me because it sums the ultimate guilt that Amir now has to bear through the years, which is basically the main theme of the book. Later, he travels back to Kabul, to find his father’s old friend, Rahim Khan, on the cusp of death, desperately needing to tell him about Hassan. I won’t say what happens to Hassan, because this is a big surprise.
The narrative voice of Amir is excellent, because it makes you feel like you could easily relate to him, even if he is a 38-year-old Afghan-American living in California. Also, Amir likes to talk about the weather, so you feel like besides knowing the main events that happen in the story, you feel as if you were actually there, because of the great descriptions of scenery. For example, as Amir watches Hassan and Ali leave the house for the last time, he talks about the unusual weather occurring at the moment. Even though it is the heart of the Afghanistan dry season, late July, when it would usually be around 115 degrees, the city is being cooled by a rare thunderstorm. Amir describes looking through the windowpane as “trying to see through a river of melted silver”.
The Kite Runner is a New York Times Number One Bestseller, as was Mr. Hosseini’s first novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. I would also like to read this book, because it is about the interesting subject of Islam, which I know almost nothing about.
Sincerely,
Your Student,
Graham V.
