The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

(amazon.com link)

It's been over 6 months since I posted a book review, but here is one.

I received The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini as a birthday present last year. Due to being much slower with reading since last Fall, I didn't pick it up until recently, and it was with a bit of trepidation that I began this book. The blurb on the cover says that it is a "Moving portrait of modern Afghanistan". While one can assume that any such portrait would include some of the horrors of today's Afghanistan, I was not looking forward to a page-after-page assault on the senses. In that regard, the book was a success. There were certainly enough gut-wrenching scenes, but that wasn't the main point of the book, and I was able to get through it without too much difficulty.

The book is the story of Amir, who was born into a wealthy family in Afghanistan in 1963. It was a small wealthy family, as he had no siblings and his mother died in childbirth, leaving him, his father Baba, his father's servant Ali, and Ali's son Hassan. (Is Baba his father's name, or just his language's word for father? That wasn't clear to me.) For the first 100 or so pages, it's the story of Amir's childhood, focusing primarily on his relationship with his father and also with Hassan.

In Afghanistan, Amir's relationship with his father is always strained, as he is more a person of letters and thought, while his bear-wrestling father is a man of action. It is obvious that Amir's father is looking for someone like himself in a son, while Amir is not that person.

With Hassan, Amir's relationship starts out almost brotherly and eventually becomes quite strained. I thought the relationship was somewhat hokey at times, as narrator Amir played the "evil twin" to Hassan's picture of purity and goodness. I guess Hassan seemed too "perfect", but then that contrast is what the narrator was trying to portray.

Suddenly, on page 110 (of 372), Ali and Hassan are gone, and with the Soviets in control, Amir and Baba are emigrating to America. For a while, the story is on the improving father-son relationship. Eventually Amir gets married, time passes without too much interesting happening, and suddenly it's 2001. I felt that this middle section wasn't all that interesting. It almost seemed like a half-hearted effort, but you could say that the author/narrator was making a point about how uninteresting his adult life was, compared to his childhood.

This, of course, is all a setup for Amir's journey back to Afghanistan as a 38-year old in 2001, when the country (at least Kabul) was still ruled by the Taliban. While there, he confronts old demons, long hidden but not forgotten, and tries to see if, as a friend suggested, there is indeed a way to be good again. While in Kabul, there are a few coincidences, including one that I would consider a deus ex machina. (See if you can spot it.)

All-in-all, though, I think it works. I can spot what the author is doing at times, but that doesn't make it any less intriguing of a story. If I gave fractional stars, I would probably give this one three and a half. But I don't, so I'll give it four stars out of five.

All that and I didn't even tell you what a kite runner is.