The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street

(January 27) Liked it a lot.

I had a hard time with this at first -- there are some early scenes of brutality that made me think I’d stepped into another A Fine Balance. I loved A Fine Balance, and could not stop reading it, but it was very traumatizing. Back in June when I started it, The Kite Runner seemed also to be setting me up to break my heart, so after about 70 pages I stopped.

Andrea convinced me to complete it -- she said that it became a different book after those early scenes and that it was well worth finishing. She was right on both counts.

Actually, the more of this book you read, the more of its art you see, and that was strangely comforting (similar to my dad’s always saying to us as kids when we freaked out over scary movies -- “Don’t worry, the cameraman’s there.”) There are so many carefully orchestrated parallels in this book, and every single thread dropped in the early part of the book is conscientiously picked up later on, so that after a while it’s hard to worry that these actual events occurred. This is not to suggest that The Kite Runner is a creaky book, not at all. Hosseini has a wonderful voice, and he is able to excite strong passions in his readers, such as hatred of the Taliban and a desire to see Afghanistan (or to at least meet some Afghan people).

Interesting that it’s another book about atonement, after I just finished Atonement, lol. Even more interesting: I didn’t think the “atonements” were adequate in either book. The main characters in both do things, or neglect to do things, that have horrible consequences for other people, and what they each do to “atone,” in my opinion, falls far short of the mark and actually turns into personal profit.

I realize that Hosseini’s narrator, Amir, has to be a coward for the story to work, but he is a terrible, terrible coward, and I find it hard to like him. It’s also hard to believe that such a coward ever becomes a good writer. How can you have anything worth saying about life if your first and only instinct is to protect yourself from it?

Atonement, Ian McEwan

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Triton Fountain

(January 15) Really, really liked this.

The irresistible part is the relationship between Cecilia and Robbie -- have lovers ever been more tragic and star-crossed than this? But everything about this novel is great. The bare bones of the plot are fascinating in themselves, and then McEwan does interesting things with them. There is some Virginia Woolf, some metafiction, some stream of consciousness, some gritty realism -- all of it used perfectly to tell its part of the story.

Then there is the whole sub-theme of the growth of a writer, which I found very compelling because it was easy to identify with Briony. I, too, wrote plays when I was 10 or 11, and cast my sister, brother and next-door neighbour in all the parts. Briony’s childhood play, The Trials of Arabella, is a miniature Punch-and-Judy version of the main story of Atonement and it cleverly begins and ends the book.

On top of this there are some intriguing symbols and images worked into fabric of it all, such as vases with flowers; water in all its forms; disembodied limbs, which crop up in a variety of cunning ways, without being either intrusive or instructive; references to works of art, such as Clarissa (a romanticized rape), Hamlet (the hero’s awkward choices are not unlike Briony’s), and (a copy of) Bernini’s Triton Fountain. The water imagery, which flows (lol) through the whole book, is thoroughly instructive (in contrast to the limbs) and is very well done.

And then, for me, there’s a bittersweet aspect to Briony that is haunting. Though it’s easy to identify with her at first, as time goes on it’s hard to like her, both for what she does to Cecilia and Robbie and for the way she allows herself off the hook for it. Do writers tend to be like that?