Vacation Reading Book Review: The Kiterunner

So I decided that I would read The Kiterunner by Khaled Hosseini as my vacation reading this year. That lasted about two days, because that's how long it took me to read it. It was an intense book that flowed easily from chapter to chapter, containing enough graphic violence that Dreamworks figures they can make a movie of it.

The protagonist, Amir, is utterly real, a child born into privilege in a country in which the privileged are several worlds apart from the unfortunate. He is not brave or pure of heart, but he is not bad. He is like many of us who are generally good people but are subject to petty jealousies and indecision if not outright cowardice at critical moments.

Interestingly, I think readers know how the plot will turn before Amir, who narrates the text, knows. Often, of course, this statement means that the plot is mechanistic and transparent -- that the author is crudely putting his characters through their paces in search of an ending that has been pregiven and an enlightenment that has been unearned (see Savage Holiday by Richard Wright -- an author I greatly admire usually, and even SH has something to admire, but the main character's enlightenment surely isn't it). I don't feel that way about Hosseini's novel. Amir's character flaws dictate his lack of awareness -- he must overcome his humiliation and shame before the past falls more clearly into place: he gradually comes to understand his position within the pre-Russian invasion Afghan society and the price he must pay to atone for mistakes committed when he was very young.

Maybe the final confrontation with Assef was a bit much, but it isn't completely unbelievable. After all, Assef is a bully and aligns himself with those who will give him the power to bully. Moving from neighborhood roughneck to state-sanctioned bullying is only a matter of scale for him.

The characters of Ali and Hassan are harder for me to understand, and I am wondering if it is because I'm uncomfortable with the idea of selfless devotion or if it's a more specific blindness toward societal structures in tribal cultures. Yes, Ali and Hassan are Hazaras, who are derided, oppressed, and murdered by dominant groups (Pashtuns, Taliban,...), but their depiction in the novel fails to go beyond that of selfless servants. Perhaps much of that is due to Amir's point of view -- he and Hassan are great companions but he never thinks of Hassan as his friend and he's ashamed by that realization -- and it may be a point of argumentation once literary critics really sink their teeth into this novel as to whether Ali and Hassan represent a blindness on the part of the author or of the narrator. How would this story have been told from their perspective (compare for instance Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea)?

It is interesting that Hosseini makes Amir a novelist. Amir's attraction to the written word separates him from his father, who is a consumate man of action. Amir's creative life is spent in worlds of his own making, and he often seems incompetent incapable of reading the world around him properly, as in the moment of greatest shame for him, when his relationship with Hassan changes irrevocably.

Amir is in the end redeemed to an extent -- as in classic sagas his redemption is bought through completion of a quest and great suffering -- and on the way the lost Afghanistan of Amir's youth becomes both a nostalgic and highly compromised recreation.