Just Finished Reading Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, is one of those books that was renown and celebrated (and criticized) years before I ever got around to reading it.  But now the deed is done and I'm ready to give my reaction...

In The Kite Runner, the country of interest is Afganistan, the narrative tracing back to 1971 while it was still a kingdom and "progressing" along to a coup d'etat establishing a republic in 1973, the Soviet Union's invasion and occupation through the 1980s, the civil war in the nineties following their withdrawal, and then the takeover by the brutal Taliban in the late 1990s.  Yet although I learned quite a lot about this land and its people, beliefs, and culture through this book, it is more a story about betrayal, redemption, and forgiveness than history or geography...

Amir, the protagonist and narrator, is a member of Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group, the Pashtuns...who as Sunni Muslims tend to look down upon others, especially the Shia Muslim Hazari people. Amir's father is a prosperous businessman who has taken under his wings as servants a Hazari man and his son, who is Amir's age and named Hassan.  As Amir points out repeatedly with copious examples, Hassan is loyal, humble, and courageous...all qualities that Amir admits to be sorely lacking in.  After Hassan has repeatedly and faithfully defended Amir from others over the course of their almost brotherly friendship, Hassan one day finds himself in desperate straits...and Amir cowardly abandons him to his fate.  This betrayal, along with the guilty fear that others will learn of it, haunts Amir for years on end...how can he ever redeem himself or be forgiven?  And it is this that is truly the core theme of The Kite Runner...

Speaking of the book's title, kite flying in Afghanistan is quite a competitive interactive sport, much different from what we in the United States are accustomed to.  Whereas kite flyers here vie to see how novel or fancy of a kite they can make and keep airborne, Afghan kite flyers engage in combat between their kites, using sharp-edged string to sever their opponents' kites from their strings.  And when you've cut off a kite, then the race is on for the first "kite runner" to reach it as it falls to the ground...it's a "finders keepers" kind of competition.  And who is the best kite runner in Hosseini's tale?  None other than Hassan...

It's obvious that The Kite Runner owes a great deal of its popularity to it being published in the years soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  Both President Bush and his wife Laura read and praised it, and the book won numerous awards and was adapted to film.  Yet in Afghanistan itself there was a great deal of criticism, the bulk of it aimed at what some of their people regard as unfavorable depiction of the Pashtuns.  Needless to say, the Taliban weren't too happy with how it portrayed them, either.  I myself read it as a human drama and as a confirmation of what I had long known: no matter how exotic the culture may seem on the surface, folks are motivated by pretty much the same things, for better or for worse.  It's a good book, and I highly recommend it...