An Opinion on “ Kite Runner ”
By Anjela Meesaq
Have you ever read a book that you want to take it everywhere to read? You enjoy reading it too much you want to finish it at once? Those sorts of a book that makes you late to work in the morning and makes you stay up late at night. The one you take to toilet and make others wait to use the bathroom because you can not leave it down and the one that its story absorbs you like a water sucking sponge. The “Kite Runner”, a novel by an Afghan American writer Khaled Hosseini, is exactly one of those sorts of a book. I have not felt the same about a book for a while maybe since reading “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden. Or if I juggle my memories from the time I was still a young girl; reading books from stashes of books of my father’s library during the long winter school holidays back in Kabul; “War and Peace” by Lev Tolstoy, “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo, “Three Sisters” by Anton Chekhov and many more.
“Kite Runner” was first published in Britain by Bloomsbury in October 2003. It has received many awards and recognition by many acclaimed book critiques. Like many of its prestige reviewers that have already commented, I think what makes this book so unique is an ardent story told in such an honest way. It is a powerful story like the post effect of a destructive hurricane; it is passionate like an expression of a bleeding heart of a betrayed lover during a flamenco dance. An exhilarating tale of betrayal and self believe in winning fatherly love. A story that must have come from within; as Khaled says in his interview with Riverhead Books (http://www.bloomsbury.com/Authors); it is not a story that happened to him, it is not an autobiography but there are certain true incidents that happened while he was growing up in the affluent area of Wazir Akbar Khan, that inspired him to write the novel. Something that rooted in him as a child and later branched off as a novel.
I believe that this is a story that many well educated young Afghans would relate themselves to in one way or another. It is a tale that is told so openly that no one else, no other Afghan, would tell but the one who has truly inhaled the air of a western democracy. “Khaled” puts himself in the shoes of “Amir” or I should rather say that “Amir” puts himself in the shoes of “Khaled”; he is tired of protecting the Afghan family honour that is filled with endless lies and pretentious gestures and so he simply confesses to his in law family the illicit affairs of his father with the servant’s wife and the birth of his half brother Hassan.
In this book the socio-political intricacy of a well divided society is described in a manner that is almost scary to believe. The story is almost like a confession of a rich Pashtun aristocrat exploiting the poor and vulnerable Hazzara. The truth is that this kind of exploitation happens in Afghanistan now and has been happening over the centuries but no one dares to talk about it until, well, until the “Kite Runner”.
The first couple of chapters make you think of the mystery that “Amir” holds; the quilt that he is feeling is well portrayed that makes the reader feel the same. His intangible relationship with “Hassan” and his father is well unfolded, how by betraying one you could win the heart of the other. Then it is Amir’s and his father’s life in the US; the battle of gaining self respect of Amir’s father, coming from a very well off Afghan background, in the “land of opportunity”. The book presents very well the true feelings of many Afghans, the once educated, the once powerful, as refugees and immigrants in a society where they feel nobodies. Then it is the very last chapters, my least favourite part of the book. That is when the mystery of the mystery gets revealed by Amir’s father’s best friend and “Amir” heads to Afghanistan. It feels like the story plot of a Bollywood movie. Although these chapters draw a well deserved conclusion to the story, it feels like it is told in a fast forward manner. It gives the impression that the writer perhaps gets impatient and wants to finish the book as soon as possible. But the very end conclusion of the story cleverly puts the reader in an empty frame of mind as though it should be the reader who has to then form what will happen next.
I love the use of certain Dari words and expressions in this English told story. They are very well mingled as though they are part of the English language. It is a book that if have not yet read it; read it and if you have then read it again.
