BOOK REVIEW:

THE KITE RUNNER
BY

KHALED HOSSEINI

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

PRICE: RS 300

 

More because of 9/11 than because of his story, Khaled Hosseini’s “Kite Runner” has a significance in the world because it acquaints us with the Afghan thought, the Afghan way of life, their feuds and values. It is  a moving account of two little children growing up in Kabul, one the servant and the other the master. Breast-fed by the same woman, the two grow up as mates but never friends because the difference in their status always gave the upper hand to Amir, at Hassan’s cost.

 

The portrait of Hassan, the servant’s son, is lovingly etched by Khaled Hosseini; Hassan is the poor boy Amir wished he was, because he has greatness of heart and spirit. While Hassan’s unfailing sacrifices for Amir go unreciprocated, Hassan remains unconcerned. He comes from abundance, not poverty and doesn’t mind his friend’s small-minded jealousy. The Afghan contempt for the Hazara tribe to which Hassan belonged, plays its part in keeping another wall between the two children, already divided by wealth. As Hosseini narrates in the words of Amir, “The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either. Not in the usual sense, anyhow. Never mind that we taught each other to ride a bicycle with no hands, or to build a fully functional homemade camera out of a cardboard box. Never mind that we spent entire winters flying kites, running kites. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara. I was Sunni and he was Shi’a and nothing was ewver going to change that. Nothing. “ And yet, despite that their basic humanity as children got the better of them as they played, “ But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and no history, no ethnicity, society, or religion was going to change that either. I spent most of the first twelve years of my life playing with Hassan.”

 

 

The story is moving and the characters are well defined; Khaled Hosseini excels at complex and simple characters, whether they be Amir’s father, the wealthy and respected Baba or Rashid his friend, or even the simple and spiritually strong Hassan. But it is in drawing women that the book suffers and is incapable of anything beyond cardboard characters, suffocatingly two-dimensional. Hosseini appears to relegate women to the background which might underline the Afghan’s viewing of women as little more than house-holders meant to play second fiddle in a man’s world. It is because he is on unsure ground with women that the writer in Hosseini prefers Amir to leave from the USA for Kabul without his wife. He never offers to take her along and nor does she offer to accompany him, which rescues Hosseini from the task of dealing with the women angle; this weakens the book, taking away its much required depth.

Why did Amir not tell his father what happened to Hassan on the day he won the kite comptetion knowing fully well that Baba would have avenged any crime to either him or Hassan? Why did he not talk to Rashid? There are so many questions here that remain unanswered and become what Hassan warns Amir about, the Plot Hole. Why was his wife able to confide to him her running away with another Afghan, despite her knowledge that she was confessing to an Afghan, but he was unable to utter that he was a coward when a crime was being committed against Hassan?

 

The second half of the book in Afghanistan moves the book away from Hassan and Amir to Afghan politics and social problems and the book slackens. Amir’s inability to have a child appears to be “conveniently” resolved in Hindi film style, by the ever-obliging Jeeves, Hassan, who dies leaving his child an orphan. Too neat a device, it fails to convince. If Hosseini had steered away from such “plot holes”, and stayed away from showing the good and the bad political guys in Afghanistan, the book is a masterpiece in fiction. Hosseini is a story-teller par excellence, and one awaits his next book with impatience. A fine book that sensitizes us on how much we are all so alike despite being so different.

 

 

My ranking: 7/10