The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini

I actually bought this book for a friend for her birthday before I’d even read it, because I’d heard such good things about it, and she loaned it to me after she’d read it.

This novel is set in Kabul, Afghanistan. At its heart, it is a story about the friendship of two outwardly different boys growing up together in pre-war Afghanistan. The book’s most compelling and recurring themes are shame, power and identity. Amir’s existence at the outset of the novel is a charmed one – he lives a life of economic, social and ethnic privilege in Afghan society. Amir’s childhood is coloured by a strained relationship with his father and feelings of isolation. He prefers books to soccer and he struggles to reconcile his own sense of self-worth with the messages of his inherent ethnic superiority that he is bombarded by. His eventual complicity in the growing ethnic tension and violence culminates in a betrayal of his friendship with Hassan.

I found this book compelling and emotionally engaging. While I didn’t read the whole thing in one sitting, I did finish it in a day. It is a book that I’ll remember and reflect on long after I’ve read the last line, which is a compliment of the highest order.

Like most of the books I have been drawn to recently, this book speaks powerfully about reconciliation – about how we live today with the mistakes we’ve made in the past. I think the relationship between Amir and Hassan offers us a parable for the ethnic tension that plagues Afghanistan.

Although there are no similarities in place or time, this novel reminded me in some ways of Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies, a book I enjoyed immensely when I read it years ago and which I think I shall revisit soon.