Book Name: The Kite Runner
Author Name: Khaled Hosseini
Wikipedia declares it as the first book by an Afghan writer in English, which must (at least according to Wikipedia) mean something. For me, the book has earned the dubious distinction of being a work that every girl in my hostel seems to have read and dearly loved. I’d see it all over the place…it was, as if the book was following me around…tucked in my friend’s economics book or left in apparent abandon on a nearby table…ah well, how could I resist? End semester exams be damned…I picked up the book and began to read.
Initial fears of over hype were removed before I got through even half the book. I felt comfortable with the book…I can’t quite explain it. The Afghanistan (both past and present) that Hosseini describes is very different from the India I live in. Yet there was this uncanny similarity of tone that made me think I was reading something by an Indian author.
The story isn’t anything that you haven’t heard before. Half brothers, a circle of fate; very Bollywood in one way.
The villain Assef is a cardboard cut out – a boy who is a Hitler sympathiser and a playground bully of the worst kind grows up to be a paedophilic Taliban general. The whole bit about him having a German mother, seemed unnecessary to me as in – what did it add to the story? Something as crude as say, ‘that explains his Hitler fixation or something?”
On the other hand, the book has the sort of narrator Amir who simultaneously moves me to disgust and at the same time earns my kinship. A dreamy boy, filled with literary ambitions. He can be quite selfish and vicious when he chooses to be, and yet be wracked by guilt over his own selfishness. The degree to which he goes disgusts me, but I know how difficult it is to be courageous enough to own up to something you’ve done and I think the way his act of cowardice shapes his identity is well shown in the book. Truth is, I think it would be wrong to say that Assef is the actual villain of the piece. The greatest struggle in the book it would seem is the narrator’s struggle with the guilt of his own actions. He is the most memorable of the lot of Hossieni’s characters.
The rest are light on the memory. The father, the wife, the uncle, even the lovable Hassan and his son Sohrab… it is as if they play their part in the book but there is nothing distinct that makes them memorable.
It is however, a very well written book, something to be read for say the tone and the bittersweet aftertaste that it leaves behind for a short while.
Ps: Next Time: Horny Werewolves and a Dashing Amnesiac Prince
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