Scratches the heart with a feather touch. Review on Kite Runner, The - Khaled Hosseni

A long time has passed since a book has moved me enough to write a review about it, and the Kite Runner moved me, though gently.

This is the story of a little boy, Amir, living in Kabul; about his relation ship with his father, whom he calls Baba and with his best friend Hassan (the family servant’s son) during peace time and war time in Afghanistan. The entire book is viewed through a key incident that happens in his childhood. In it, Amir’s failure to stand up for what is right gives birth to a guilt that darkens his experience of the life that follows.

Let me see, how did I experience this book…?

In the first third, i.e. before the incident, I experienced innocence, beauty and peace. I, being a son, identified with Amir’s desire to win his father’s approval and his heart wrenching failure at it. Through Hassan, I relived the times in my life when friendship was completely pure. In Baba, I saw my father, a man who has lived life on his own terms and loves his family more than anything, but is not really skilled at expressing it. One paragraph that hit home a little was

My father moulded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

I don’t know if this appeals universally to sons, but to me, it rang true.

In the second third, i.e. after the incident, I experienced life the way it is when no matter what you do, who you become, what you dream and what you achieve, it all seems incomplete because of a sentence you gave to yourself years ago when you were a child. In the book, after the incident, there was happiness all around. They survived the war, the father son relationship improved, Amir moved on to have a normal life. Yet, the incompletion always left life just short of being completely fulfilling.

In the final third, there is completion and redemption. I do not go into details, because that would require revealing the story, which I find unsacred.

But there is much more to the book. There is a gentle beauty in the way it is written. Each scene, each conversation, first transports you to that place so you can almost see the people, the houses, the trees and live the lives of the characters. The story is delivered with a walk in the park pace, yet, there is something electric about it that made me feel at the end of every chapter that it was a page turner.

It did one more thing for me that I did not expect from a fiction. It completely humanized the Afghan community, and as an extension, the entire world for me. The book has been written by a Muslim and I am a Punjabi living in India. Through this book, I experienced the author’s culture and my heart warmed at the similarities in culture and language that we have.

I like to believe that I am an open minded individual, to whom caste and religion do not matter and who sees all as human beings. If I am being completely honest, I am all that, but I also have my prejudices, however little they might be.

This book suddenly reduced differences in the world for me, in addition to being the beautifully told story that touched my heart. It made the world a place where people like you and I live in a place like war ravaged Afghanistan and interestingly, made this planet feel more like home.