The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
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Khaled Hosseini knows how to write a compelling
novel. Its plot has a graceful shape, its characters are tangible and vividly colored, and it changes course so deftly you'll hold your breath as you watch it move. It's easy to see how the book landed on several lists of the best work of 2003; he's crafted a story about fathers and sons that is timely, yet ageless. The Kite Runner is the debut novel from Hosseini, an Afghan-American who immigrated in the 1980s and now practices medicine in San Francisco. The book's title conjures the pre-Soviet Afghanistan of the 1970s; in the narrator's childhood memories it is a place of beauty not yet marred by Russian tanks or rigid Taliban law. It is the capital city of Kabul, where two young boys enter a kite-fighting tournament and race to catch the winning kite, the last one aloft, before it falls to earth. The son of a wealthy businessman, Amir is a young boy hungry for his father's approval. His closest friend is his servant Hassan. Though Amir is far above him in the hierarchies of wealth and status, he envies Hassan terribly for surpassing him in gaining his father's affection. Amir's resentment spins the two wildly off course, tangling their lives into a snarl of friendship, family, betrayal, and shame. Long after he and his father flee Soviet-occupied Kabul, Amir’s actions continue tugging his thoughts back to the knotted past he shared with Hassan. Amir is a storyteller, a boy who grows up to be a novelist in his adopted American home. Through his eyes, we see the sweep of Afghanistan's recent history, his father's experiences as an immigrant in the U.S., and his own return to his ravaged homeland in the waning days of the Taliban. Told with painful honesty, his story is beautiful, tragic, wise, and utterly compelling. Review by Mark Bradshaw, April 29, 2004 A review of another recent title about Afghanistan, journalist Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul is available on the Watermark website, here: http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0104-001.html |