The Kite Runner is Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, and the sad thing is that you can tell. It’s one of these books that are extremely predictable. I wasn’t at all surprised when I found out that Hassan was related to Amir, and when Amir discovered that he and his wife couldn’t have children, and then found Hassan’s young son after Hassan died, it was just so boringly obvious that he was going to adopt him. Perhaps even worse is the fact that I just didn’t care very much. Though Hassan’s death itself was horrible, I found that I didn’t have enough time to connect with his character before he died, resulting in the fact that I felt no emotion at all when that happened. Amir does the whole “No… No… No… No… Oh, it can’t be…” when he finds out, and then he tells his wife and she does the same thing, and it’s all very cheesy and I just really can’t sympathise with any of them.
The Kite Runner details the life of Amir, a boy in the beginning and a forty-year-old man by the end, who spends his childhood living in a mansion in Afghanistan. He establishes a friendship with his loving and selfless servant Hassan, but Hassan is just a Hazara slave, belonging to the Shi’a branch of Islam, while Amir and his family are Sunni Muslims. Hassan is often jeered at in the street, and Amir never has the courage to stand up either for Hassan or himself, as the friend of a Hazara. One boy living nearby called Assef, who is particularly cruel to Hassan, rapes him one day, a traumatic event which Amir watches, doing nothing to help Hassan. Amir lives with the guilt of this his whole life, and seeks redemption for the way he treated his servant. Assef grows up to kill Hassan and his wife and buy his son, Sohrab, whom he abuses too. When Amir, who immigrated to America after the Russians invaded Afghanistan, hears of this, he travels back to Afghanistan to try and find the little boy and adopt him, as a way to atone for his past actions. He finds the boy, whom he manages to rescue and adopt, having fought and overcome his old adversary who’s now joined the Taliban. This part of the book in particular played out like some kind of formulaic Hollywood movie. From the beginning of the book, as an eleven-year-old boy, Assef is introduced to us as the typical baddie (one of the first lines he says is about how much he supports Hitler). Twenty-five years later, when Amir finds him and the boy and they fight each other, Sohrab throws a stone in a slingshot at Assef’s eye, making Amir win the scuffle. The problem with this was that it, too, was corny. Hassan was known for his talent with the slingshot, and now his son just, what, inherited that ability? The happy-ish ending, too, where everything is resolved, Amir and his wife adopt Sohrab, the bad guys have been defeated and they’re all living happily ever after in San Francisco… It would have been much more intriguing, much more tragic, more real, if they’d all just died!
Another issue that I have with this novel, besides from poor character development (or sheer lack thereof), was the way it was written. I don’t want to completely slaughter Hosseini and this novel, but his writing style was just too jarring to read smoothly. He has a habit of tacking on a part of a sentence as a completely new one altogether. That doesn’t make much sense, so I’ll give an example: “I walked up the creaky stairs to the second floor […]. Checked the address on the piece of stationery paper in the palm of my hand. Knocked.” Every sentence is like this, with each new one starting with a verb that could have just as well been in the previous sentence (e.g. “[…] the palm of my hand and knocked.”) It’s not like Hosseini uses this device for effect, because he uses it all the time. Another example: “We stood quietly side by side. Necks bent up.”
All of that said, this novel wasn’t a complete failure. The characters that I actually cared about─namely Rahim Khan and Baba─were portrayed perfectly well, as more than one-dimensional characters like every other one in the novel. The descriptions of Afghanistan before and after the Russian invasion and the reign of the Taliban were done quite well, ‘before’ being this fruit-treed utopia and ‘after’ being racked with poverty, disease and murder. Hosseini’s experience with growing up in 1970s Kabul certainly put him at an advantage, as his descriptions were more personal and vivid.Overall, I thought this book was just mediocre. I was expecting more from such a famous novel, I have to say!
There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.
I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.