The Kite Runner Illustrated Edition

And now it brings "The Kite Runner," a beautiful novel by Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini that ranks among the best-written and provocative stories of the year so far.

Hosseini's first novel -- and the first Afghan novel to be written originally in English -- "The Kite Runner" tells a heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between Amir, the son of a wealthy Afghan businessman, and Hassan, the son of his father's servant. Amir is Sunni; Hassan is Shi'a. One is born to a privileged class; the other to a loathed minority. One to a father of enormous presence; the other to a crippled man. One is a voracious reader; the other illiterate.

The poor Hassan is born with a hare lip, but Amir's gaps are better hidden, deep inside.

Yet Amir and Hassan live and play together, not simply as friends, but as brothers without mothers. Their intimate story traces across the expansive canvas of history, 40 years in Afghanistan's tragic evolution, like a kite under a gathering storm. The reader is blown from the last days of Kabul's monarchy -- salad days in which the boys lives' are occupied with school, welcome snows, American cowboy movies and neighborhood bullies -- into the atrocities of the Taliban, which turned the boys' green playing fields red with blood.

This unusually eloquent story is also about the fragile relationship fathers and sons, humans and their gods, men and their countries. Loyalty and blood are the ties that bind their stories into one of the most lyrical, moving and unexpected books of this year.

Hosseini's title refers to a traditional tournament for Afghan children in which kite-flyers compete by slicing through the strings of their opponents with their own razor-sharp, glass-encrusted strings. To be the child who wins the tournament by downing all the other kites -- and to be the "runner" who chases down the last losing kite as it flutters to earth -- is the greatest honor of all.

And in that metaphor of flyer and runner, Hosseini's story soars.

And fear not, gentle reader. This isn't a "foreign" book. Unlike Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago," Hosseini's narrative resonates with familiar rhythms and accessible ideas, all in prose that equals or exceeds the typical American story form. While exotic Afghan customs and Farsi words pop up occasionally, they are so well-defined for the reader that the book is enlightening and fascinating, not at all tedious.

Nor is it a dialectic on Islam. Amir's beloved father, Baba, is the son of a wise judge who enjoys his whiskey, television, and the perks of capitalism. A moderate in heart and mind, Hosseini has little good to say about Islamic extremism.

"The Kite Runner" is a song in a new key. Hosseini is an exhilaratingly original writer with a gift for irony and a gentle, perceptive heart. His canvas might be a place and time Americans are only beginning to understand, but he paints his art on the page, where it is intimate and poignant.


Afghanistan, The Taliban, and Family Love   May 21, 2004
prisrob (New EnglandUSA)
557 out of 679 found this review helpful

"The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini is one of those marvelous books that opens up our hearts and minds. This book puts a name and face to the people we are helping to free. This is a book at once so magnificent,it is difficult to comprehend and describe. How could we be fighting for freedom in this far off land, Afghanistan, and not understand the people; their heritage, their land and what they lost?

This book transports us to a very different time in the 1960's. Amir and Hassan, friends, raised in the same household, but in different worlds. Amir is the son of a wealthy businessman, and Hassan is the son of the servant, Hazara. There may be a difference in the lives they led, but they became fast friends. Amir would learn to read and Hassan would not. Amir would have the most beautiful toys and particularly kites, and Hassan would be able to help Amir play with the toys and run (fly) his kite. Amir was the spolied son, Hassan was the intelligent and intuitive servant's son. Their lives would intertwine even when separated.

When the Russian army invaded, Amir and his father fled to the United States, California. Amir grew up in a different land, but with the same Afghanistan culture. He and his father became close. Amir married, went to college, all the while wondering what happened to his childhood friend, the one he betrayed.

As time marched on, Amir lost his father to cancer and was summoned to Pakistan to meet with an old family friend. This turns out to be a life renewing event. Amir searches for news of his friend, Hassan. The search takes him back to Afghanistan, to an orphanage, a meeting with a member of the Taliban, a search for his lost city and culture and for a prize he will cherish, for the truth and for the life he regains.

This is a gritty book, the beauty and violence of this country, Afghanistan, comes to life. The customs and food and smells of the city; the desolation of life and the loss of the country to madmen who are running it with only their imagined vulgar needs and wealth in mind that destroys a culture so varied and rich.
We can imagine we are there, and we can share in the sights, the smells, the utter disregard for human life. But we can never know what these people have lost. A book, I will cherish, so will you. prisrob


Overrated and Second-Rate   August 16, 2004
M. J. Mohseni (San Diego, CA)
376 out of 472 found this review helpful


I wanted to read the book because I'm an Afghan emigre myself, and I was really interested to read my first novel by an Afghan emigre.

The first part of the book, which is about the protagonist's childhood in Kabul, was a like a psychoanalysis session for me - it revived so many long-forgotten childhood memories. Almost with every paragraph, I thought to myself, yes, I remember doing that too!

Then the book turns into a soap opera. They move to the US; struggle with their daily lives; there's the inevitable love story; the father dies of cancer; etc. But with just one phone call from Pakistan, suddenly the story becomes an action drama, the kind you see in the movies, with an implausible sequence of events. The story becomes over-dramatized and filled with cliches. I couldn't stop thinking that Hosseini had making a movie in mind when writing the book.

The background information about the culture and contemporary history of Afghanistan is not bad, but you can get more information if you just watch a PBS special on Afghanistan.

Some of the recent fiction that I have been reading lately includes Saramago, David Foster Wallace, and Houellebecq. Comparing with these writers, it's hard for me not to say that this book is second-rate literature. I'm really puzzled with all these glorifying reviews on this board. I had never written a review on Amazon before, but felt like I should write one for this book since it seemed to me to be overrated.



Enough, already.   April 13, 2005
james m.
134 out of 200 found this review helpful

Jeez, people. I understand why folks want to like this book. I really do. It's based on a part of the world that many in this country--including myself--do not know much about. The culture, the geography, customs, the grief. I get it. And honestly, without that driving curiosity, I wouldn't have made it beyond chapter three.

This is a poorly written book. There, I said it. Its driving narrative is solely based on shock and pity. The narrator is, simply, pathetic and entirely unredeeming. I'm not saying you have to like your narrator, but at least don't make him out to be such a coward and so utterly, utterly boring.

The language is amateurish; the devices are cliche. Obviously the author realizes his dependence on cliche as he writes a whole paragraph at one point about it. Right after a painful page of the stuff. And dare I even mention predictability? Who didn't know the two boys were not related in some soap-opera-ish web after a few pages? Or that there was a lost child that needed to be saved when our narrator couldn't have one? Or that--oh never mind.

The author has no regard for reality; I love that our narrator so easily falls on his feet (thank GOD he was able to quickly publish four books and go on reading tours without really having any training or setbacks).

And then there's the rapist. Please. Please. Please. I guess he had to be part German (and OF COURSE, OF COURSE, OF COURSE he would be proclaiming the virtues of Hitler) to do the dirty deed, as it's just too far-fetched otherwise for a native Afghani. Not in this culture.

Foreshadowing is a painful place to go. As is cliche, device, narrative breakdowns and the like. I'm dissappointed that THIS is the book that's taking fire on all the lists of the day. Never again do I pick up a book that has an Entertainment Weekly blurb listed TWICE on its cover.

One word: blah.




Utter disappointment   December 7, 2005
Manola Sommerfeld (California)
109 out of 163 found this review helpful

I am not a best-seller type of reader. Maybe my tastes stray too much away from the mainstream, but i rarely get entranced by a best-seller the way i see other people. But this book somehow piqued my curiosity, so i went for it.

If cable channels produced daytime soap-operas, this is what they would look like. The stage is grand: a poor and proud country. At the center of the story we have a dysfunctional family with a few secrets. And then the soap-opera gets its wheels in motion, only that instead of the corny moves of Days of Our Lives, what we have here is rape and sadistic killings and blood and gore. I had a hard time swallowing the amount of misfortune that some of the characters had to endure. After a while the relentless catastrophes made me very mad. This novel placed a high stake on its shock value, and won, based on the number of copies sold. Do people want to be shocked so mercilessly by what they read? Apparently yes. And also by what they watch on TV, and this is why programs where contestants have to eat worms have such a following. Sadly, this book is no different. I would clench my teeth at the beginning of a new chapter, afraid of what horrible thing was going to take place next.

Some of the key characters were absolute cliches, which is funny because Amir, the narrator, complained about cliches. We have the polar opposites of good (Hassan) and evil (Assef). There are no gray shades there. They are 100% good and 100% bad. Amir draws very little sympathy. He comes across as a complete coward, and even when he knows he needs to float above his own shortcomings, he chokes, and then spends several pages justifying himself. The only truly interesting character in the whole book is Baba, Amir's larger-than-life father. The parts where Amir talks about his father are the best in the book. But you see, those parts are only about human nature and relationships. It doesn't matter what country or what culture you're from: people react to people and feelings the same way everywhere, and the complexities of love and hate and anger between human beings are and will forever be fascinating. The rest of the book, quite honestly, was never at the same level.

My biggest caveats, in no particular order:

The many examples of karma in action stink, they are so obvious and contrived: son avenging father using slingshot, one of the attackers of young Hassan suffering the same type of abuse himself, Amir's scar on his lip after the beating, and on and on and on...

The very convenient plot details and coincidences: Soraya has an uncle who works at the INS, sadistic Assef finds the little boy among the thousands of orphans in Kabul...

The way the characters' speech is portrayed drove me nutty. If they are Afghani, they are speaking in Farsi. Amir transcribes their speech into English. Why then pepper the dialog with non-English words?!?! And to make matters worse, there is no glossary at the end to help you remember what those words meant!

The arrogance of the writer, who spells things out for you because he may fear you are too dumb to figure them out. As a reader, i like to be surprised. I hate predictability, yet here you knew what was going to happen with the boy once Amir discovered Hassan had a son. You knew who the evil executioner was in the soccer stadium...

The ending was too much. The book gets nicely wrapped up with Amir and the little boy flying kites in San Francisco. That was too corny, too sickly sweet. All along the novel plays with the feelings of the reader, and this After-School-Special ending was the final drop.

Apart from the brightness that Baba brings to the story, and the curiosity i have developed to finally see one of those glass strings for the kites (didn't they have gloves in Afghanistan?), this book was an utter disappointment.