 Review
By P.A. MacLean
RedwoodAge.com
Perhaps it is the intimacy
of fiction that allows us to know more truth about people and their culture
during war than all the news stories or images of carnage can convey.
At a time of war, the sweeping narrative of battle, the politics of
advance and retreat, can obscure the nature of humanity, at once cruel, kind,
loving and self-loathing.
The pleasure of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, “The Kite
Runner,” is that it takes us so far inside Afghanistan that we can also see
ourselves and our weaknesses.
Hosseini takes us back to the Kabul of 1975, before the
invasion by the Russian army and the country’s revolution, to the peaceful
Afghan childhoods of Amir and Hassan, two boys first seen sitting in poplar
trees tossing mulberries at one another and laughing.
The lives of narrator Amir, the privileged son of a
well-to-do Afghan, and Amir’s closest friend Hassan, a servant, protector and
a kite runner, intertwine in a way reminiscent of the Cain and Abel story yet
with its own tragic arc.
Hassan is Hazara, Shi’a Muslims considered an inferior
class in Afghanistan, while Amir is Pashtun— the elite, the ruling class and
Sunni Muslims.
“The Kite Runner” takes its name from kite fighting, a
vicious sport in which players attempt to slice the string of a competitors kite
using glass-coated twine. The
losing kite, cut free, falls to earth as a melee of kite runners chase after it
hoping to be the one to catch the kite in their arms before it lands.
Hassan is the best of the kite runners.
The saga that carries us through Afghanistan to immigration
to America and Northern California is by no means a simple coming-of-age story
but a story of redemption.
The vividness of the rendition of the Afghanistan of the
past and its culture, both the one left behind and the one carried to America,
instructs with extraordinary clarity about the misunderstandings between our two
cultures today.
It shows how little we know about each other and yet how
much we are the same.
Hosseini’s deft writing allows him to use his knowledge
from a youth spent in Afghanistan and years as an adult in the United States to
show us where the cross-cultural tensions lie.
Not only the cruelties of class tension between Hazara and Pashtun but
also shows us how America looks to the newly arrived as they struggle to survive
in a culture at odds with nearly everything they knew.
Hosseini fulfills the promise of his writing by animating
vivid images of lives too often obscured by headlines of war.
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