Book Review: The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner, deserves all of the credit that he’s been getting in literary circles. This novel, his first, won at least a half dozen awards and was a #1 New York Times bestseller – very impressive. After hearing some folks on the radio talk about how excited they were for the movie coming out, I went and purchased a copy of this book to see what the big fuss was all about. I wasn’t disappointed.

The Kite Runner is a powerful story of a man named Amir. The story follows Amir from his days as a young boy to a fully grown man. Amir is born a child of privilege in Afghanistan during the 1970’s. His father, Baba, is a well known Afghani having given many of his neighbors their first “chance” whether it be a loan or a job or a hand out when it was most needed. Baba has a servant, Ali, who has a son named Hassan. Amir and Hassan grow up together and The Kite Runner is essentially the story of how their close friendship affects Amir for the rest of his life (or at least until the end of the book).

Hassan is fiercely loyal and protects Amir from some of the bad kids in the neighborhood – though he does this at the cost of his own safety. Ultimately, defending Amir puts Hassan in a situation where he is harshly abused by another boy and his two cronies. Amir witnesses the assault and his response determines the path of his mental stability for the rest of his life (or depending upon how you read the book, until the end of the story).

Amir buries his knowledge of the assault and goes on living with Baba until the Russians begin to invade Afghanistan. At that point he is rushed with his father out of the country and they eventually wind up in America. Baba – who has given Amir much of the direction in his life – passes away from cancer, but not before assisting Amir in becoming engaged to a young Afghanistan woman named Soraya. It turns out that there is a large Afghan community in the San Francisco area and Amir becomes a part of this community with his new wife and her family. Then, almost out of the blue, he is called to Pakistan at the request of one of his father’s former business associates who is now dying. Before the associate passes away, he makes a request of Amir: to make everything good again for both his father and himself. To make things good, Amir will need to find Hassan’s son, Sohrab, and bring him to a better life.

The story gets very quick and very interesting at this point and the last hundred pages or so are very good. As a child, Amir won a large kite-flying tournament and he had some assistance from Hassan to help collect the prize kite. The final scenes of this book revisit a kite race setting and gives hope to the reader that there might be hope for Hassan’s son, Sohrab.

There are times during this story when I feel like Amir tortures himself too much over his inaction as a child. Amir expects much from himself, but that is because of what his father expected of him as a young boy. I wonder if all young people have this mentality about themselves and their actions. I hope not!

I am grossly oversimplifying the last 100 pages of the book for the sake of this review, but I would suggest reading The Kite Runner if you have some free time and are looking for a good story. And if you do read it, let me know what you thought!