Novels

The Kite Runner

Everyone else has read The Kite Runner already. I haven’t, perhaps because I suspected that it would break my heart. I was right. But it was worth it.

It’s about boys growing to manhood, guilt and repentance and forgiveness, honesty, brutality, family and doomed friendship. All of it unfurls against the backdrop of an Afghanistan once intact but steadily decimated by Russian occupation, then the Taliban, then the post-9/11 war. All of it has happened in my lifetime, but it has been until now at the periphery of my awareness because my knowledge of the place was so vague.

I couldn’t go back to that now if I wanted to. One novel doesn’t make me an expert, but it gives me a true and strong taste. Hosseini writes with love about an Afghanistan where deep ethnic, ideological and class divisions exist even before the turmoil of the early seventies, when the narrator of this tale is just a boy. The back of the copy I read contains a brief letter to the reader, written by publisher Celina Spiegel. What she writes is an apt description of my response, too:

Since reading this haunting novel, when I’ve seen the headlines about Afghanistan in the news, I’ve experienced the tragedy in a surprisingly personal way. I feel a connection to the land and its inhabitants that I never felt before.

It was impossible to read this book without deep grief. I couldn’t imagine pulling for any characters more than I did for these. But beyond that, I don’t have anything to add to the many thorough and detailed reviews already out there. This isn’t a book I want to analyze.

Highly recommended.

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