At the urging of my fellow English teacher, Erin, and my student who I adore because she adores English class, I read The Kite Runner. My student, having read and loved the book herself, very much wanted me to read it and brought me in her copy to borrow. It was a really cool experience to have the English student recommending and lending a book to the English teacher. I brought it with me to my parent’s house for the holidays, and engorged its near-400 pages in less than 3 days.
My review of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner:
The story begins with our protagonist, Amir, a child of ten, living luxuriously in Kabul, Afghanistan circa 1970. These days, I learned, were a fruitful time in Afghan history, the days pre-Taliban. Amir lives with his philanthropic, widely revered father, Baba, and in a hut on their property lives Baba’s lifelong servant, Ali, and Ali’s son, Hassan, who is a year younger than Amir. Hassan is Amir’s best friend, although Amir never quite admits that to himself or to others due to the fact that Hassan is a Hazara, a race of people looked down upon by the Afghans. To the reader, Hassan is immediately adorable–he has an unfettered loyalty to Amir, an infinite propensity to forgive, and he is the fastest “kite runner,” which means that when a kite is brought down during a kiting competition, he can track the falling kite with more success than anyone. As Amir takes the reader into various engaging stories, situations, and recollections of his childhood, we become acutely aware of his shortcomings: his cowardice, which glower in a sharp contrast to Hassan’s endearing qualities, and his insecurities that are constantly triggered by Baba’s near-rejection of him. In Amir’s attempts to be embraced wholly by his distant father, he goes to lengths that are both pitiable, reprehensible, and that ultimately leave him haunted and disgusted by his actions. In his suffering, and as he learns to deal with himself, a self he abhors, I found myself aching with Amir– for who can’t relate and bemoan their past and events that happened that we forever long to go back and change, but tragically can’t?
The story fluidly takes us into Amir’s adulthood where he is living in California after he and Baba escaped the Taliban regime years before. Here, Amir pursues his writing passion, one of his passions that was never quite understood or accepted by Baba. Amir marries, has success in his writing career, but is still unable to free himself from his long-past transgressions. Fortunately, and as with all truly good stories, an opportunity comes for Amir to find redemption when he is phoned back to Afghanistan and he finally finds himself willing to step outside of his weaknesses in order to “be good again.” After years of living in shame and self-contempt, Amir willingly enters into multiple dangerous and sacrificial situations in order to be a man that he can live with. In one scene, Amir comes face to face with his and Hassan’s childhood tormentor, a neo-Nazi maniac, named Assef, and is able to conjure up the courage to make a moral–and violent– stand against Assef’s torturous actions against Hassan’s son.There are ways that the idealistic reader will be left disappointed: Hassan and Amir don’t get the chance to meet as adults, and the while the novel ends with hope, it does not evade the reality that life does not always leave relationships squarely worked out. A deeply visceral, emotive novel, The Kite Runner adeptly accomplishes multiple tasks: it exposes the foreign reader to the Afghan world, it connects the reader with their own nagging sins and their consequences, and it leaves the reader hopeful that, within a lifetime, God will give us opportunities to transcend our shortcomings and become someone better.
