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?